Week 7 – GDC Prep and Post GDC Prep

This week I worked on implementing the first playable build for midterm, focusing on getting glyx and both collectible types into the level. Most of the student behaviors made it into the level, the only one that didn’t is the student behavior that used to be the Teleporter and now moved in and out of the background and foreground. Unfortunately there was a problem with the build that was made for QA, so there was no new information that was able to be gleamed on how to further iterate upon the level from feedback yet.

Moving forward I’m going to be working on getting that final student behavior into the game space as well as tweaking values of the students so that they work as smoothly and properly as possible. Further down the road I am going to start concepting all the levels that we are planning to have in the game, which is currently four. Each level should take approximately five minutes to complete and need to be full of collectibles, glyx and the belly-fish. These concepts will make the next step, blocking out, very streamlined and easy to implement and iterate upon. Once I’m done concpeting and documenting the levels I will iterate upon them and start to block them out.

Week 5 – Post Greenlight

We finished strong for Greenlight this week, getting everything we wanted in and passing the stage challenge with minimal things to polish up for the requirements. We finally have a settled in art direction, before we had been tossing back and forth having both the underground cave / drained water cavern level and the above ground level. Now we’ve narrowed it down to just the cavern, which will be nicer for level design at least, as well as being able to push the art in this single environment instead of cutting our manpower in two with different environments.

My work the past week was largely comprised of creating some level mock ups, basically taking previous sketches and updating them to the current glyx states and cleaning them up in Illustrator so that they were up to the presentation level of quality.

Going forward with the levels I’ve started take my mock ups and bring them into the game space, getting them ready for QA as soon as possible. I want to start with a jungle-gym like area that will contain both introductory skilled platforming aspects as well as intermediate platforms to perform some more advanced moves. Once I get a feel for how players are moving in the space and the limitations of the glyx and stretchy arm I’ll be able to start constructing the games actual beginning area and start scaling the difficulty appropriately.

Week 4 – Greenlight 2.0

So this week we didn’t end up challenging for Greenlight, but we made some decent progress in a lot of areas that we’re ready to finish strong with and be ready for Greenlight next week. We finally got a more refined art direction, which is probably going to be narrowed a little more even and stretch goals added on top of it. Alongside a decided art direction we also have a more refined sticky arm control scheme as well as better control support with more control over where the play can actually send their sticky arm.

This week I finished up the Collectible Behaviors VDD as well as some more level mock ups with the decided art direction. I also got together an asset list that we’ll need for platforming as well as general objects that  we’ll be needing to build out the levels. This helped to get more of an idea of what the scope is for the two different environments of levels we were planning on having. We were going to be going for an above ground level with weird alien trees and possibly ruins of a past civilization that used to live there.

Going forward I’m going to be working with Chris on implementing the different collectible behavior types into the game. Hopefully we’ll have some more students to place into the actual game by then, but it wouldn’t be imperative. I’ll also be updating the behaviors VDD if needed dependent on how close we are able to create them to the document.