This week in game design disaster struck. Steam got updated and when it did our game suddenly stopped working on the new version. To remedy this we had to update Unity and VRTK. While we though this would be a quick fix, it soon became apparent that just attaching the updated assets to our old project wouldn't work. We needed to create a new project and work from the ground up with the new VRTK set up.
This had several annoying repercussions. The lighting in the building had to be rebaked and now looks much worse. We decided to skip fixing this for now as it's still functional and right now we need to finish our game before worrying about aesthetics. We also have to make all of the intractable game items work again. Once we have that done it will be a race to make the game winnable and check up to make sure the menu and credits scenes still work. Next Week I will: -support Ryan in testing and fixing the game
0 Comments
This week in game design my teammates and I worked on putting my last major pieces into the game. Pretty much everything worked as planned with a couple minor hold ups. The one thing we need to fix next week is the death text that displays when the player dies. Right now the display doesn't seem to be working and if it did the text would render directly onto the player's eyes. This is obviously a problem in several ways and we need to figure out a way to both render the text in world space and have it follow the player's headset as they look around waiting to re spawn.
Next week I will: -Fix the death text for our game -Help with creating any other last minute assets This week I finished up a lot of the materials I needed to get done for our project. I finished all the functionality for both the menu and Credits scene. I put a nice skybox on both of them so that they look pleasing to the eye. I then created some ambient music for the menu scene. The biggest challenge I had was getting the controller pointers to work in the Credits scene. For some reason when I copied them over from the Main Menu scene they stopped working. After a couple headaches and a bit of adjustment we were able top get the controllers working properly once again. For the background ambiance I found some good spooky orchestrations and combined that with wind, chimes, and heartbeats to create a thoroughly creepy atmosphere. Next week I will: -Assist our programmer in anyway possible to implement the assets I've created -Create more audio assets for the game This past week I buckled down to make the Main Menu and Credits scenes work. Originally when we made the Main Menu scene we only had a start button and so when the player clicked the button all we had to do was write a code that loaded the next scene in the build. Unfortunately when we added a credits scene this no longer worked as we needed the player to be able to get to either the Credits or the Main Game from the Main Menu scene. After a bit of tinkering around I got a new system to work based off the string names of each scene. I still need to do some work making the credits scene look nice and professional as well as adding sound to both scenes but by the end of next week the starting UI scenes of the game should be nearly done. Now that all the coding is done I can simply focus on making these areas of the game look good.
Next week I will: -work on beautifying the Main Menu and Credits areas of the game Most of this past week was spent trying to solve one very specific issue. The school's internet stopped allowing our VR computer to use Google Drive. This meant we spent several days trying to figure out how we could access the assets we had put there in order to get them into the game. Unfortunately nothing we tried worked and we eventually concluded we would have to use a flash drive to transport any additional assets.
After we came to that conclusion it took roughly the rest of the week of the computer to wipe the flash drive then store all of the assets and scenes we had to it. Now that that's done we're finally back on track and next week I should be able to finish the UI menu. Next Week I will: -Finish the UI menu This week in advanced studies I focused on creating a script that would revive you when you died in our horror game. We decided the best way to revive a dead player would be to create a timer that’s automatically reloads the scene a set time after death. To create this script I mostly used my prior knowledge of coding UI elements as well as a code for a timer that I found online. The code was worked and I was I able to hook it up to the proper UI elements and finish my scene. Next week I can work on hooking it up to our game and fixing any resulting bugs.
I also made artwork for our credits scene which I can create next week as well. Next week I will: -Put the respawn script into our actual game -Create a credits scene off the main menu This week I continued to work on creating a Menu UI for our VR game. After a lot of research and package downloading I finally created a version that worked in first person mode. From there we needed to make sure the menu would work in VR. My teammate and I spent the last part of the week making code so the menu will load the next scene when we click on it. This took a bit of research and a touch of original coding but eventually we got it to work.
Next week I'll focus on creating a Credits scene to get into VR sometime next week. Next week I will: -Create and implement a Credits scene This week in Advanced Studies I focused in on creating a UI Menu for our game. Along the way I discovered several challenges in making a working menu. The first was that I had never used buttons in Unity before./ I had to acquaint myself with this new component using sample codes and prefabs I found on the Unity standard assets package. I also found several tutorials to teach me about making menus but unfortunately they were all blocked by our school's security net.
The next step was trying to figure out how to make my menu work in Unity. I found several assets on the store that claimed to have examples of UI in VR. However I kept getting errors when I tried to import these assets and could never fully find an example that would work. Next week I will: -work with my UI menu in world space to make it interact-able in VR -work with Ryan to import the menu assets into our game and make sure they work This week was filled with a lot of random ends to tie up and projects to start. I finished all of the pig animations. There is now a running pig animation as well as a pig attack animation. After that I decided the best thing for me to do would be to start working on UI. We're going to need several types of UI for our game including a menu and a score keeper.
To start, I looked on the asset store to see if there were any free menu scripts I could use. Eventually I found that in the standard assets there was a menu and I was able to track it down to it's source script. From there I spent my time trying to understand the script and get an idea of how I would have to adapt it to work in VR. Next week I will: -Work on adapting the menu script to fit our needs -Create 2d assets for our menu and score This week we continued to work on fixing glitches that we found while testing in VR as well as other individual tasks. I finished the last of the chicken animations and plan to start working on boning the pig model next week. In coding I helped I little bit to try and debug the chicken. Right now the chicken can't seem to figure out how to go back to it's patrol points after chasing the character. I'm confident we can figure out what's happening next week however with some more intense debugging.
The full map of our school building is almost done being modeled and I hope we can get that imported into our scene soon so we can make sure it won't lag our game too badly. If it does I plan to work on a script that would help us load different areas of the game separately. This would solve some of the lag issues if it worked. Next week I will: -Help debug the chicken -At least start to bone the pig |
AuthorSamuel Henry is a Senior at DSA in NC. He has 3 years of prior experience in the game design pathway and he's looking forward to becoming a great game designer. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Categories
All
Archives
May 2019
|