Devlog. 4: First week of Production Sprint 1

Introduction:

Hello everyone once again! Welcome to the fourth edition of the devlog, we are now in full swing of production. With possibly incredible luck or out of mercy of our course moderators, we managed to be allowed to go into production after our prototype showcase last week. So the game is now finally being officially developed and it's already getting along well. We have now come to a state that is comparable to last week's prototype with maybe here and there a few missing features but nothing that can't be added next week with more on top. 

We spent the first half of the week setting up our production plan for the game. Outlining, specifically for the first sprint, what tasks will be completed by who, when and what exactly they have to create. We're hoping that this will help to keep this small trip on track and provide us with focus, as well as an Edgar Allan Poe pendulum of deadlines to help us motivate (hooray).

we're right now still good on track to finishing everything on time, the most important parts of this week's work have been completed with a result that can be showcased to you guys. There isn't a finished game loop yet, we are hoping to have something comparable to this done by the end of week 2 but no promises.

Art Section:

Once again, like all the previous weeks, our busy bee artists, Matteo and Tommy have been busy creating block outs for us programmers to have fun with and for them to later model and texture. Their primary focus for this week was to finish a full block out of the level (again, but still just as important), allowing us on the programming side to implement our features and modify them to work perfectly with the level structure. Below, you will find the result of their hardwork.

I already hear those gears in your brain ticking and coming to an obvious answer; 'it doesn't look that different from the one two weeks ago'. And you'll be right, but there are small difference, a few layout changes of room structure that didn't make sense in the previous, the walls have been made thinner to allow for easier view with the camera and finally, the most important one and the reason why both artists worked overtime on it, every room is its own block out. What you are seeing is not one big block out, its made up of a bunch of smaller block outs all in preparation of allowing the artists to work on each room separately and decorate them. This has also future benefit for the programmers, we now have full control over each room, so if anything needs to happen in one room specifically, all this can just be added within the separate prefab of the room. Pretty cool of them if you ask me.

They weren't just working on this, Tommy was also busy getting the first few parts of the level modeled more properly, if you look closely you might spot some of his handywork but I've provided some more close-ups below. These are just the beginning, he promised you, that by next week there will be more finished models to see within the level. He even made a small animation for a possible future mechanic you might encounter in the game, you can have fun guessing what precisely it will be.

Our Matteo was also busying himself with some of the block outs as well as playing level designer and finalizing the level layout of our mansion level. Figuring out where each room will be as well as possible traps hidden around it, I specifically got from him a layout that just shows what rooms there'll be, I can't give away already some of the trap positions. For all you might know, they could all be randomized. But to still give all of you a small sneak peak found below.

Along with the block outs, Matteo being our expert in all technical and boringly complicated graphical uh...stuff has been working on making sure that everyhting works as expectedly and looks proper when visualized within our level. As he had put it; 'each used asset for the rooms has a collider now and light bleeding has been fixed.' So thank god that this light bleeding is gone from the level, hopefully never to be seen, whatever it could have possibly been. Which in all honestly just shows Matteo's efficiency, he got rid of a problem before I even knew what it was. What a guy.

Programming Section:

And finally we have come to the boring programming part, where we the programmers have been hard at work restructuring the scripts that we've made within our prototype to a more presentable state and not as rushed as we had made them before. For now we still haven't got anything too visually to look at but a lot of the core systems for the game are now implemented and the ones left are those needed to finish the gameplay loop. 

 Cristian has been focused on creating the guard, once again implementing his patrol behaviour, his detection behaviour and finally his chase behaviour. He's been excellently using the behaviour tree pattern within Unity to allow for all these to be implemented and future ease of use for us when we need to add more specific behaviours to them such as when the player happens to make a noise or when an alarm goes off within the level. Thanks to his work, we now have a fully moving guard enjoying the insides of the level and chasing the player characters that are running around within the level. Take a look at him down here, isn't he just the most precious little security enforcer?

Our Raphael in the mean time, was implementing another important system within the level that works in directly with the guard and is a core part of our stealth gameplay, the sound system. Letting us activate sounds within the level, and making the guard react to them and start an inspection behaviour towards them. along with this, setting up the range types for the sounds that vary based on some rooms as well as corridors to create a hopefully more dynamic game experience for you guys in the future. See how considerate of a person he is. With all of this, this should help us implement more of the gameplay mechanics in the coming weeks.

Lastly, I have been working on creating the player, its camera and splitscreen system we will use within the level. Trying to get the game feel as its best state as possible and generally making sure that we have a player character that we can use to interact with the game world. Along with this, setting up the different possible input controls that can be present within the game. Hopefully, in the future allowing a more variety of controllers to be used with our game. As someone that prefers the switch controller, this sounds just fantastic.

That just about concludes this edition of the devlog, there wasn't too much to show off but granted this is the first week of actual production, we are currentlly in the process of trying to get everything right for future development and setting up the building blocks for the overal project. We're hoping to have more to show in the next two weeks, so keep your eyes out for future updates. Bye everyone!