Devblog Week 7: (29/11/2021)

These weeks are really flying by, it feels like yesterday when we last posted.

As we spoke on previously we had a prototype to show this week. In fact we presented it earlier today. But lets go further back first, to the past 3 days.

Getting ready for the prototype we knew issues were inevitable as that's just the nature of making games. We were not prepared at all for the landslide of issues that befell us.  For some time we've been using a script that combines meshes together to make modular buildings and using common materials to save on setpass calls, this was in the editor and quite elegant with no issues, however on the 27th when pushing to github we discovered that when Unity combines and saves meshes it does so in the scene file causing our quite minimal scene to become over 100mb in size.  This issue meant that we had to scrap a lot of our level by deleting the saved meshes, it's quite easy to get them back however a new script will need to be made that merely instantiates the prefabs so reduce our scene file size by 50 fold (Quite literally I'm afraid.)

That was not the only source of our issues over the past few days. In our crunch to get a good prototype ready we decided to refine and implement some minor features, such as knockback and a smoother camera rotation, this was a mistake as the scripts previously written were done in an overly complex manner making any change break everything. Spending over 12 hours working on them we had to give up and are now focusing on rewriting them for this week. This took a real mental toll on two of our team members and we need to be careful to ensure this sort of thing doesn't happen again as much as we can help it.

The other things we're working on this week are player animations to bring life into the character for the vertical slice in 2 weeks as the texturing will take too long. Optimising our models to hopefully get the scene fully populated once again although this sprint will last two weeks and be cutting it close. We do hope to show off what we managed to get done to our peers but these issues are preventing it. We do however have a good start on the rigging of the player model which sadly wasn't used but here's a picture anyways. The animations will have to be written out and designed first, that way our animator knows what to do and can work without having to also design the animations.

As for the playtest we got good feedback despite it's barebones state. A slight recolouring of the UI elements is needed to draw players attention to them more. This is to draw more attention to the steam mechanic which is the core unique feature. We'll be changing the outer rim from it's dark grey to a more brass colour which we hope will make them pop out. People did really like the artstyle and with the lighting being minimal at the time due to the baking issues faced with the number of meshes and setpass calls we're excited to have a more polished product in the next two weeks as we focus on refinement and optimisation. The UI was designed in such a way as to give a slightly used and beaten up aesthetic to the tools themselves befitting of any construction tools, while simultaineously showcasing a style that would fit into the setting on an industrial and mass produced level.

We really appreciate all the feedback we got and are positive this week can't be worse than last week! We'll keep you up to date and looking forward to updating you all next week.