End of the term

What Got Done (last 2 weeks)

• Finished up the project with Mesh Baker to automatically generate texture atlases for all entities and update prefabs.
• I spent a good amount of time figuring how we would handle team colors when all of the textures were baked into an atlas before runtime.  I tried at first to use PSD files where each layer was the texture with a different team color and then split them up in Unity.  This turned out be a lot of work for artists and generated a ton of different files, so this was scrapped.  The way to go was to use a custom shader for team colors.  Since we have no shader experts I had to spend some time researching shader programming.  What I ended up with was a shader that takes a color as a parameter (for team color) and then overlays a transparent texture on top of it.  This works pretty well and the artists only need to make certain parts of the textures transparent.

• I updated the project to Unity 4.6.1 and the NGUI package to 3.7.7.  I had to spend some time fixing some of the functionality that broke with the NGUI upgrade.
• Added events that get fired when units or towers switch states (walking, attacking, idle, etc) and an example script showing how to use them.  This was for Jonathan to help him get started with implementing particles.
• Fixed a few more bugs with the map editor.
• Added some debug options to expand territory and switch teams.
• I also spent a good amount of time during the last 2 weeks at design meetings.  We have been restructuring some of the units and towers to reduce the workload on the artists.

Total time:  44 hours

Fall Term Review

I'll keep this quick.  We got a lot done over the last term, but it's been a bumpy ride.  We had a bit of a rough start going into production with constant bottlenecks and setbacks.  Although where we are today is not what I expected I do think, as a team, we've learned a lot from the last term and have improved.  I am really proud of the amount of work that you guys have been putting in for the second half of the term.  We've caught up a lot but we still have a long way to go.  I hope that we can continue this momentum and keep moving quickly after the break.  Whale yeah!