Milestone 7 (Naomi)

Overview

For this sprint, we focused on getting everything ready for our beta presentation and prototype. Together, we worked on the presentation slides in Canva, communicating through iMessage on how we wanted to organize the information. Some slides, we worked on individually, for example, we each had our own "Challenges" and "Enhancements" slides, but some we contributed on together. After the Beta presentation, we went through a list of SFX and music that was made previously (will get into more detail in section "Music and SFX Browsing") and tried to narrow them down, voting on our preferences.

Besides what we worked on together, the following sections cover what I worked on for my individual tasks.

Modelling, UV Mapping and Texturing

Last sprint I had Luna nearly complete aside from a few details on her dress. After I added those, I modelled the Moon from a cylinder that I extruded into the shape of a crescent, and I also modelled the capsule (the place where she is trapped), which was a fairly simple shape.

I also worked on the final models for the enemies to replace the placeholder models I made for the alpha prototype. I relied a lot on the grab and smooth tools to get the shape of the enemies to look right since their shapes are quite abstract. For the smaller enemies, I was able to make the body once and reuse it for all the models since they have the same one.

After modelling came UV mapping which was not difficult but quite time consuming, especially for Luna.

As for texturing, I applied the alpha textures to the enemies that were already in the Unity scene, in order to ensure that the Sumaiya's wand colour match functionality would still work (this will be updated in the future to match with the enemies final material). However, for the other models, I made temporary materials in Maya's hypershade window. I plan to give everything final materials using Adobe Substance Painter, however the temporary materials were to give them some sort of colour for the Beta prototype.

Below are images of some of the final results from modelling, UV mapping and texturing: 

Animations

I added some simple animations for the smaller enemies. Since their shape is quite simple, I don't need to do any rigging for them other than their antennae. I did attempt the antennae rigging, which will animate the enemies antennae when they attack, but there were issues with the paint weight tool. Therefore, I just focused on the idle and death animations, which I created by keying the scale and translation attributes. Below is what these animations currently look like:

These are done other than a glitch on the enemy furthest to the left at the end. That should be very quick to fix in the next sprint.

Music and SFX Browsing

I went on the website Pixabay and browsed through their music and sound effects sections. I was looking for sounds that matched the magic theme, the horror theme, or a mix of both. I added everything that I thought fit into a list I created in google docs for all of us to narrow down later. Sumaiya also added some sounds to these lists: 

All three of us went through the list together, voting on which sounds we liked the most. A yellow highlight indicates that we have settled on that option. A purple highlight means that we like that option but are still debating on if we want to use it. The bolded options in the "buttons" list are what were used in our beta prototype.

This narrowing down process will be something we will continue in future sprints as we're still not fully decided on some things, and it will be easier to choose sounds based on how well they fit once the game is more complete.

Health Functionality + Unity Imports 

For our health system, I took a health bar script I wrote in second year game development and modified it to work with this project. I also modified the enemy code to have the enemies try to follow the player when they're in range and if the enemy touches the player, they do damage. I did this through trigger colliders. Right now the health system is placeholder text that will be updated to a health bar. The amount of lives is also set to a high number right now as I still need to tune the enemy attacks to not spam so much.

I also updated the alpha enemy models with the final ones and imported Luna, the moon and the capsule into the scene.

Editing the Beta Prototype Video

After my team members filmed and sent me footage of our game, I took the clips and put them in CapCut. I cut or sped up long parts in the clips and also added some text effects to section off the video and make it more clear what clips were showing what. The website was being quite slow, so it did take a bit longer than expected.

Trello Board

Finally, here is what our trello board currently looks like. Many items were moved from the "backlog" or "to-do" sections into "in progress." Many items still remain in "in-progress" because they still need fine tuning, but most cards in that section had substantial progress made on them during this sprint

Challenges

Despite getting the idle and death animations done in Maya this sprint, I was not able to implement them into Unity yet. When I tried, it broke the movement of the enemies so that they no longer wandered (they just played their idle animation while staying in place). I suspect this might be because I accidently keyed the x and z translation, which is overriding the translation assigned in the script that makes them wander. I will need to do further inspection, but this is most likely something I need to fix in Maya in order to avoid over-complicating the script.

Successes

Overall, it was a big success of how much we got done in this sprint. We got a lot of the major functionality done to the point where it only needs to be tweaked. I was able to get all of the character models finished. VR has been set up and etc. There are still some functional things we need to work on, however the sprints, from now on are going to focus a lot more on the lighter aspects of the game development, such as aesthetics and sound.

Hours Spent

In total we spent around 35.75 hours on this sprint

I spent about 10 hours modelling and UV mapping Luna, the enemies, the moon and the capsule, around 1 hour making and assigning temporary materials for them, and finally about 1 hour adding animations to the smaller enemies

I spent about 2 hours on the health functionality and updating our alpha enemy models in the scene

Zineb spent about 1 hour on the puzzle, 6 hours on the VR controls, and 2 hours on environment modelling

Sumaiya spent about 2 hours on the colour switching functionality, 1 hour on the UI buttons and instructions integration, and 2 hours on the final boss behaviour 

I spent about 45 minutes editing the prototype video

We all spent about 3 hours on the Beta presentation slides

We all spent about 4 hours browsing and narrowing down SFX and music options