Devblog Week 8: (06/12/2021)

This week has been hectic and it's our last full one before our vertical slice. This means we're in full work mode right now, heads down and all. Despite our best efforts this has turned into a bit of a crunch week but with a small extension to our deadline from the 13th to the 16th we can relax a small bit and take some time for ourselves.

So what's been done?

Well as we covered in previous posts the work we're at right now spans multiple weeks. So progress has been going well. For redoing our building models we have 63/87 models done and are on schedule to have them all done by the end of the week, in conjunction with those being done we've written some code that will allow us to convert all of the old buildings we had made using the meshrenderer script to an instantiated variant. This happens by deleting the meshrenderer but using the info from the script to generate a new set of child objects with the same meshes attached. We hope this will solve the lighting and file size issues but can't test fully until the models are done.

In other news we have managed to rewrite the player movement script and camera scripts completely which has done wonders for our sanity and made the code far easier to understand and debug. While the player hardly notices any difference (if any) it's great to have that done. We thought this would take us a lot longer so to be ahead of schedule even in one aspect has been great for team morale.

The player rigging and skinning has been a grind but is nearly done, all that's left is the hair and belt, then we can get to work on the animations. We have a total of 10 we'd like to have done for the vertical slice and we hope to get them all done but we'll have to see how many we can make after the character is skinned. To help with doing the animations an animation document will have to be done up so that the animations will be done how we want and so that our animator won't be as stressed.

A few posts back we mentioned that our constructs were exported strangely, having been excessively triangulated. Well that's moving along steadily but our member who was working on it fell a little under the weather so progress has been stalled slightly. It's still on schedule but it shows one of the downsides of a small team, one member being out of commission really makes a large impact.

Now, onto what we're doing.

As mentioned up above the buildings and level are going to be rebuilt using the new building generator code as soon as the building meshes are reimported. This will be a rather boring task but should be done in 1-2 days which for a whole level is very good time. We hope once it's done that the lighting baking will go smoothly again, we don't want a repeat of the 5 digit error figure after 8+ hours...

The animations will be done for the player and hopefully integrated, if this goes smoothly there's a stretch goal to give the player some basic colours as a texture but nothing detailed. Similarly we hope to get some animations for the constructs done, even some jagged ones would be great and just add to the clunky feel of the construct as per our design.

We hope to get a background music track done as well. One was in the works but got stalled due to the barrage of issues over the last few weeks and was put by the wayside. Depending on how it turns out we may get to work on a basic combat track but how far that will get is anybodies guess.

There are a bunch of miscellaneous small things that need to be done too, from camera shakes, to gun particles, steam effects, documents and a few more that aren't really of note for now.

Throughout this week we'll be working flat out and we hope by next weeks devlog we can have a much clearer idea of what we can get done for the vertical slice! These last few weeks have been about fixing and polishing rather than any interesting design work really but we hope that changes after the vertical slice.