Wrapping Up

The buttons graphics, postcard design, custom cursor, Whale House Logo animation, presentation slide designs, and the splash screen are completed, if not in the process of final approval. It's probably been the most work I've had to do for senior project in a while. Everything is wrapping up and coming together, much like our advisor has complimented us on. Our senior presentation is only 2 weeks away!

Accomplishments

• Button Graphics
• Kail
• Augher
• Postcard Design
• 01
• 02
• Custom Cursor Design
• 01
• 02
• 03
• Whale House Logo Animation
• 01
• Presentation Slide Designs
• 01
• 02
• 03
• 04
• Splash Screen Design
• 01

Next Steps

• Keep practicing for presentation

Desiree Ann Lim

Presentation Preps

Accomplishments

• Rendered video for presentation (3 hrs)
• Put together the video (0.5 hr)
• Sniper Superunit issue fixes (1 hr)
• Practiced my part of presentation (1 hr)

Total: 5.5 hours

Next Steps

• Presentation preps
• Animate dance moves for Kail and Augher

Issues

• Forgot why I didn't animate Sniper Superunit. Then I figured out that the rig for the Unit and Superunit is kind of different and the animations from the Unit can be used for the Superunit in unity. So I didn't bother animating Superunit. Problem solved. 

Kai-Lin Chuang

Diabeetus

We puut in the main things into the game. Now, it's all the little things...

Finish Line

• Kail Animation 2nd Passe(2 Hrs)
• Splash Screen (1 Hr)
• Gygan Reign Title (1.5 Hr)
• Victory and Defeat screens (1.5 Hrs) 
• Presentation Video (2.5 Hrs)
• Total -8.5 Hrs

Progress

Splash Screen

• Image

Gygan Reign Title (revamped)

• Image

Victory + Defeat Screens

• Victory
• Defeat

 Presentation Video

• Video 

Battle Plan

• Some extra sweeteners here and there
• Animations

Damage Control

• Doing all the things before project is due!

tl;dr

Now time for practicing presentations!

Sweetening the game

Producing Things

• Pose Augher and Kail (1)
• Presentation material (1)
• DIGM team work session for presentation (3)
• Followed up on sounds (1)
• Splash screen (0.5)
• Housekeeping on Trello and Slack (1)
• Selection screen video for Augher and Kail (5)
• Selection screen image for Augher and Kail (0.5)

Total: 13

Proof of Progress

Foreseeing the Future

• Presentation videos
• Practice presentation
• Render selection screen videos

And Now, For Something Completely Different

Early this week I worked with Dylan to get the animations in order for the Intel Level Up competition. I also kept working on the audio scripts for all units/superunits, towers, and Gygans.

What Got Done:

Unit/SuperUnit/Tower/Gygan Audio (3hrs)
Animation Edits (3hrs)
CS Presentation (6hrs)

What I'm Doing:

CS Presentation
Whatever I'm needed for

Most of the time this week was spent getting the game ready for the Intel Level Up competition.

What Got Done

• Added tutorial sequence for new players.
• Overall polish to fix any issues before submitting to Intel Level Up competition.
• Added background music to all scenes.
• Added a splash screen and new main menu background.
• Polished maps.
• Went to a playtest session with Ryan's residents and made adjustments based on that.
• Bug fixes related to GameStateManager and ending the game.
• Refactor of Entity hierarchy to remove situations where entities would be initialized or die twice.
• Lots of work on the CS presentation.

What's Next

• More work on the CS presentation.
• Preparing the game for IndieCade submission.

Total time:  40 hours

The whale way to Senior Show

We've got our list of sweeteners that we want to achieve for the game. In addition to each DIGM student creating their portion of graphics for the presentation, we are all still working towards making our game the best game at the Digital Media Showcase!

On the other hand, the programmers of our team have wrapped up the documentation due for their senior class. Dylan will be working with the artists to get the sweeteners in while Cory and Ryan will be working on the game in addition to the poster that is required of them.

Countdown: 3 weeks

Producing Things

• Particle Meeting (1)
• Project planning for competitions (4)--includes meeting with Dylan, Trello board set-up.
• Gatling Superunit and Tower (3)--includes modeling, weight-painting, and exporting for Friday's build
• Follow up (1)
• Tuesday morning meeting with DIGM (1.5)

Total: 10.5

Proof of Progress

Master Asset List can be found here.

Gatling Tower

New Trello Board

Foreseeing the Future

• Superunit particles
• Presentation materials

Whale.

Got work done.

Finish Line

• Kail Concept Art (2 Hr)
• Gatling Unit Animation - 2nd Passe (2 Hrs)
• Buttons (1.5 Hr)
• Presentation (2 Hrs)
• Total -7.5 Hrs

Progress

Kail Concept Art

• Draft 01

Buttons

• 

Battle Plan

• Senior Presentation
• Animations

Damage Control

• Doing all the things before project is due!

tl;dr

ALMOST OUT OF TIMEEEE.

Much Progress ._.

Accomplishments

• Weightpainted Brigade Superunit (3 hrs)
• Rigged and weightpainted Kail (2 hrs)
• Animated rough animation for Kail (2 hrs)
• Edited Brigade and Gatling particles (3 hrs)
• Animated atttack animation for Augher (1.5 hrs)
• Put together assets for the Senior Show presentation (2 hrs)

Total Hours:  13.5 hours

Next Steps

• Finish up all animations
• Prepare for Senior Show
• Edit particles stuff

Issues

• Weightpainting Brigade Superunit was frustrating. Though I found out what I was doing wrong so things ended up well.

Last Minute Comments

Senior show is almost here! Still got quite a few stuff left to do.

Kai-Lin Chuang

[Post Title]

This week I finished up docs with Ryan. I also added scripts to the unit/superunit and tower prefabs for sounds. I also also started updating the CS presentation since it will be reviewed for final presentations tomorrow.

What Got Did:

Finishing DD (5 hrs)

Re-formatting all docs in Word and then exporting pdfs (1hr)

Sound scripts (2hrs)

CS presentation updates (3hrs)

What Gun' Be Did:

Final CS presentation

Whatever I'm needed for

What Got Done

• Added touch support to our game.  The game is now fully functional with touchscreens on Windows.  
• Lots and lots of optimizations to get the game running better on less powerful hardware.  On the graphics side, his included switching to deferred rendering (it cut the amount of tris rendered by almost 50%) and removing some dynamic shadows.  The game rarely even breaks 300 draw calls now which is a decent improvement from before.  On the programming side this included going through the profiler and optimizing any scripts that we causing lag spikes or had high CPU usage.  This resulted in some more optimizations to territory and our unit pooling process.
• Added some art to the game.  This included prefabs for Kail's units and icons for the different units.
• Added the gygan selection screen.
• Kail is now in the game!
• Lots of bug fixes as usual.

What's Next

• Hopefully another playtest session in the next few days so we can address any other issues that come up.
• Preparing the game for submission to the Intel competition on Thursday.

Total time: 43 hours

An OverWhalemingly Positive End

Accomplishments

playtested and revised map: 1 hour
created a 2v2 map: 4 hours
created a 4 player free for all map: 4 hours
unit balances: 15 minutes
test games: 20 minutes
sound review: 1.5 hours
particle updates and movement particles: 2 hours


total: 13 hours

WIP

maps need to be beautified and tested but a playtest session this week should help with a lot of that. Kail units need a crazy amount of balance (which was expected) but they're slowly being worked in.

Next Steps

test, polish, balance, present, ship, retire, buy some ice cream.

Debrief

It's been nearly a year and I still love our game. For that I am thankful.

We're whaley getting there!

The presentation on Tuesday went well last week. We are making strides to get Kail into the game. Brigade is basically ready to go in terms of assets as of the weekend, which means the programming team will be able to implement. Gatling's assets will be finished shortly and we're looking for implementation by the end of this week or early next week. Kail's model is ready to go, which means that the animators can spend all the week making him look as awesome as Augher.

The recent hours of the team has significantly slowed down, causing concern. Time will have to be taken this week to find the source of the problem and properly address it. We're in the final stretch but there's still much to do, such as getting our promo items together, putting all the particles in the game, sounds, etc. These may be smaller things but they add so much to the game. In addition to the final touches of the game, we also have the presentation to work on. We really want to show our best for the show!

Modeling models

Producing Things

• Kail (4)
• Brigade Tower (2)
• Brigade Superunit (2)
• Particles and particles meeting (3)
• Presentation (1)
• Follow up (1)

Total: 13

Proof of Progress

Kail

Brigade Superunit

Brigade Tower

Foreseeing the Future

• Gatling Superunit
• Gatling Tower
• Draft presentation
• Attack particles for Shared Superunits

Whalp...

Accomplishments

playtested and revised map: 1 hour
unit balances: 15 minutes
iterated and partially unit walking particles: 2 hours
playtested and took notes: 2.5 hours
met with Steve to discuss sound / reviewed and gave feedback to audio iterations: 2 hours
reduced particle count in spawn particles: 45 minutes

total: 8.5 hours

WIP

finalizing particles and sound, playtesting tweaks.

Next Steps

balancing Kail's units once they make it into the game.

Whale Market

Moving on to the marketing side of senior show, I'm in charge of creating graphics for things such as postcards, buttons, stickers, and possibly helping out revamp the website. I've also got some ideas for a teaser trailer to show at the presentation.

Accomplishments

• Brainstorming ideas for graphics and trailer (1 hour)
• will be working on sketching out the concepts and then moving on to design itersations

Next Steps

• Marketing graphics continues

Desiree Ann Lim

Almost Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeee (Willy)

This week should be the last major changes to the CS docs! Hoorrrrraaaaaaaaay!

Overall I didn't have a ton to do this week. Ryan and myself are mostly just double checking docs at this point.

What I did:

Design Doc Diagrams + Words (5hrs)

What I'm Doing:

TBD?

ALMOST HERE

Got work done.

Finish Line

• Gatling Tower orthos (1 Hr)
• Brigade Unit Animation (1.5 Hrs) 
• Gatling Unit Animation (4 Hrs)
• Icons (.5 Hr)
• Total -7 Hrs

Progress

Gatling Tower CA:

• Orthos

Icons

• Draft 02

Battle Plan

• GUI
• Animations

Damage Control

• Doing all the things before project is due!

tl;dr

Got more work done... few more weeeks...

Little Progress

Accomplishments

• Finished up rig for Gatling (2 hrs)
• Weight Painted Gatling (2 hrs) 

Total Hours:  4 hours

Next Steps

• Rig and animate Kail
• Finalize animations for Gatling and Brigade
• Work on particles

Issues

• Weightpainting Gatling was annoying

Last Minute Comments

Yup, I know I didn't work much this week. 

Kai-Lin Chuang

What Got Done

• This week started out with a presentation on Tuesday so I spent a good amount of time making sure we got as much into the build as possible and then making sure it worked well.  This included a lot of little fixes from recent playtests and tweaks to make sure the game continued to perform well.  This also included a new map that I worked on with Jonathan for the presentation. 
• The day after the presentation was a playtesting session with Ryan's residents.  We had 8 players which was especially useful to see how the game performed with that many people playing at once.  We also got a ton of useful player feedback.  
• I spent most of my time this week working on territory.  After noticing huge lag spikes in the profiler when placing and removing towers I decided to actually time how long those operations actually took.  Placing a tower took about 0.2 seconds and removing a tower took an entire second!  I had known this section of code was inefficient but I hadn't realized quite how bad.  So after some heavy refactoring, the operations for adding and removing territory each only take about 0.02 seconds (essentially negligible and it won't change with map size).  After the playtesting session on Wednesday we realized our current design of territory wasn't going to work.  A possible alternative that we are looking to test is contested territory.  
  
• With contested territory you can no longer just drill a hole to your opponent's base and spam towers.  Now when two opposing towers share territory, no one will be able to place new towers in the contested territory until one of the towers is destroyed.  This also puts more emphasis on units for territory control.
• Refactor of the manager class that handles entities to make it easier to get a valid entity reference.
• Refactor of how we handle death and added death animations to all of the units.
• Created an 8 player map for the playtesting session.
• Fixed a bunch of misc errors after the playtesting session.
• It's no longer possible to make it into a lobby before the host enters the lobby.
• Played around with the shader code that we use for health bars so we no longer need to use 2 materials to get the effect we want.  This took a decent chunk out of the total number of draw calls while playing.

What's Next

• It seems like Kail's units/towers/superunits are wrapping up, so hopefully I will be able to put those in this week.
• More work on performance optimizations to make the game smoother with more than 4 players.

Total time:  34 hours

One month left

To prepare for the final project check-in, we made several pushes to give a good preview of what the final game will be like in about two weeks. We were unable to finish everything but we were able to do a wide brushstroke of what is to come. We have assets made for Kai-Lin to rig and for Kai-Lin and Henderson to animate during the rest of the week. We have a good chunk of the particles in the game but there are still some more to make--several of these are the sprinkles on top of the icing. We have sounds in the works that are a few steps away from integration. Most of the work after Tuesday will be sweeteners for the game as we do some finessing on the build.

http://bit.ly/1JuIL27

Sorry my post is late, I was busy doing THIS

Drexel Roller Hockey takes home the championship in the second round of overtime!

What I Did:

Re-did the animators because DYLAN changed the way things worked (2hrs)
Docs (10hrs+)

What I'm doing:

"Finalizing" all docs

Whatever I'm told

Whale Done

Concept Art is done! I finished up the Brigade SU and T and the Gatling T.

Accomplishments

• Brigade SU (1 hour)
• Draft 04
• Brigade T (4 hours)
• Draft 02
• Draft 03
• Draft 04
• Gatling T
• Draft 01
• Draft 02
• Draft 03

WIP Screenshot

• Brigade
• SU 01
• T 01
• Gatling
• T 01

Next Steps

• Marketing graphics

Debrief

All the concept art is done! Hooray! Now all that's left of my responsibilities is to help with marketing and prepare for the senior show presentation. Only about 1 month to go!

Desiree Ann Lim

Kail's minions

Producing Things

• Particle Meeting with Jonathan, Kai-Lin, and Miguel (1)
• Music re-organization, preparing for integration (1)
• Particle Meeting with Dylan, Jonathan, and Kai-Lin (1)
• Model Gatling Unit (4)
• Model Brigade Superunit (1)
• Follow up over the course of a week (~1)
• Asset list review and update (0.5)

Total: 9.5

Works in Progress

Master Asset List can be found here.

Gatling Unit

Brigade Superunit (not complete)

Foreseeing the Future

• Model
• Gatling Superunit
• Gatling Tower
• Brigade Superunit
• Brigade Tower
• Kail
• Attack Particles
• Sniper (edits)
• Tank
• Rush
• Prepare for final check-in on Tuesday

More green particles...This Time with Lightning

This was a week of redoing. While trying to commit a merging error occurred and caused all of my progress towards crippler was gone. So after coming to terms with the fact that I lost the work before I could back it, I went right back to working on doing them again.

What I Did

Worked more on the particles for crippler and used multiple emitters to give a lightning effect which took a while to figure out, but adds a little more to the green attack, charge and collision particles. (7.5 hours)

Also tested what how the particles looked in game, and made some tweaks based on that. (1 hour)

What I'm Going To Do

I plan to continue polishing the particles so that they look good in the game 

More to COMEEEEEE

This week was insanely busy.

Finish Line

• Gatling orthos (1.5 Hrs)
• Gatling Unit Gifs (3 Hrs)
• Gatling Superunit Drafts and orthos (2 Hrs)
• Kail Orthos (1.5 Hrs) 
• Brigade Animation (2 Hrs)
• Icons (2 Hrs)
• Total -12 Hrs

Progress

Gatling Unit CA:

•  Orthos

Gatling Unit Gifs:

•  Jumping
• Cheeks Expanding 

Gatling Superunit CA:

• Orthos

Kail

• Orthos

Icons

• Draft 01

Battle Plan

• Look up ways to spice up the GUI
• Animations
• Poster Images

Damage Control

• Clean Up Animations

tl;dr

Got more work done... few more weeeks...

Animations and Particles

Accomplishments

• Edited Brigade Unit rig (.5 hr)
• Animated first pass and third pass of Brigade Unit (4 hrs)
• Worked on and updated brigade and gatling particles (5.5 hrs)
• Started rigging Gatling Unit (1.5 hours)

Total Hours:  11.5 hours

Next Steps

• Continue with particles
• Finish rigging and weightpainting Gatling Unit
• Animate Gatling Unit

Issues

• Found an issue with the brigade rig. I had to edit it and re-weightpaint and re-animate the brigade unit. Took a bit of time.
• Miguel encountered merge issues with git so I tried to help him fix the stuff. Unfortunately, his particle test scene went corrupted so he had to rework the particles for kamikaze and crippler. 

Last Minute Comments

Nothing too much to say. Things are the same as usual.

Kai-Lin Chuang

What Got Done

• This week was mostly spent on refactoring the current setup for handling attacks between entities.  The reasoning for this was because we wanted attacks to only do damage when they hit an enemy target, instead of instantaneous raycast attacks.  This makes confrontations look a lot better.
• While I was refactoring how attacking was handled, I made target selection host authoritative.  Before we would just keep units in roughly the same position on every client and hope that they would all pick the same target to attack.  This worked 95% of the time but other times you would watch a battle where each hit is doing nothing to the target's health (because the host was attacking something else).  Now the host picks a target to attack and relays it to the clients and it works perfectly.
• Another reason for this refactor was that we had 5 unit classes and 5 tower classes with essentially the same code in each class.  The only major difference was the projectile that they fired.  So I got rid of that duplicate code and all of the individual scripts used for projectiles.  Now we have one class that replicate the functionality of each of the other projectile scripts and we can use the same code to instantiate it from each tower/unit/superunit.  These projectiles have their own prefab and easy to change parameters for the artists.

• I also starting working on the code for switching to Kail and using the Brigade and Gatling.  Most of that is done.  Next will be setting up the prefabs when I get the models.

What's Next

• Kail's units added to the game

Total time: 45 hours

Post-post Title

Accomplishments

playtested and revised map: 1 hour
prettied up "the peak": 5 hours
unit balances: 15 minutes
iterated and partially implemented tower build particles: 3 hours
created tower unearth warning particle: 2.5 hours
created and implemented unit spawn particles: 2.5 hours
tested tank movement particles: 45 minutes

total: 15 hours

WIP

"the peak" is almost complete as a map, just have to figure out the best way to deal with blending the edges into the skybox. Unit's are relatively balanced but with the approaching introduction of Kail and his units, I will probably have to change the crippler and kamikaze again. The system for implementing particles is much easier and I no longer fear git or the mass of prefabs our game has accumulated. testing particles in game is much more beneficial and more rewarding so kudos to Dylan for all his help in this.

Next Steps

I'd like to have two more maps all prettied up but they'll have to be more polished first. I'd also like to make a 4 and 8 player map. But the more pressing assignment is making sure particle polish is all over this thing.

Debrief

things are wrapping up quite nicely. I look forward to showing our game on Tuesday, and only having to make minor tweaks and add-ons from here on out. There's a lot of room for polish and I plan to take this as far as it can go but we do have something that very nearly resembles a game and that's fantastic.

Whales on the Go

We're making significant progress on various of the art areas while the programming team handles the deliverables for their senior project class. Particles are on their way in addition to other assets directly contributing to the player experience such as maps. Concept art hasn't been finished so the deadline for completing all the models will be modified a bit.

Overall all the team is making huge pushes now that the first third of the quarter has passed. Whale yeah!

Diving into particles

Producing Things

• Particle meeting with Jonathan, Kai-Lin, and Miguel (1)
• Working on Sniper particles in Unity (4)
• Meeting with Dylan to discuss issues setting up particles (1)
• Fix Brigade for upload (3)
• Fix Augher to send to Felicia (1)

Total: 10

Works in Progress

I don't know where my particle screenshot went :(

Forseeing the Future

• Model Kail, Brigade Superunit, Brigade Tower, Gatling Unit, Gatling Superunit, Gatling Tower
• Particle effects for shared units
• Make updates to Asset list with the approve sound for Steve
• Prepare sound files for Dylan to put in game

So Many Words, So Little Time

I've added about 40 pages onto the design doc this week, and still 50+ more to come tomorrow. Ryan helped me out big time by working on the Acceptance Test Plan.

I got the attack animations synced up pretty well. Had to change around the animators a bit (they're nice and pretty now) but the code changes were pretty simple.

What I did:

Design Doc (15hrs +)

State syncing (2hrs)

Poking around with the fancy new StateMachineBehaviors (1hr)

What I'm Doing:

Finishing(?) Design Doc

Helping Dylan with changes to attack particles

Little By Little

Not much left to do.

Accomplishments

• Brigade U (1 hour)
• Leg Movement
• Brigade SU (3 hours)
• Draft 01
• Draft 02
• Brigade T (1 hour)
• Draft 01

WIP Screenshot

• Brigade
• SU 01
• SU 02
• T 01

Next Steps

• Complete Brigade SU and Tower
• Environment Help

Debrief

Kail has been finished along with the Brigade Unit. The SU and T took some time to do and get feedback on, so they fell behind unfortunately. Hopefully those are completed soon so that the rest of the team doesn't have to crunch too much to finish them up.

After that, I don't much else left to do but help with environment and marketing related tasks. We're almost done!

Desiree Ann Lim

Rainin' Whales.

This week was insanely busy.

Finish Line

• Gatling Drafts (3.5 Hrs)
• JLA Image Edits (2 Hrs)
• Kail Orthos (1.5 Hrs) 
• Looking at GUIS (1 Hr) 
• Total - 8 Hrs

Progress

Gatling Unit CA:

• Draft 12
• Draft 13
• Draft 14

Augher JLA

• Draft 01

Kail

Battle Plan

• Whatever else is on the list for concept art
• Look up ways to spice up the GUI
• Animations
• Orthos for Kail and Gatling

Damage Control

• Gotta do more concept art!

tl;dr

Got work done, gotta speed things up. Again.

Green Particles and Ham

This week was a pretty experimental one. I did some research with our Particle Playground, but it turns out that the research did not make the process as easy as I expected. I also learned how to properly use GitHub, and I created some attack particles for the Kamikaze and Crippler units.

What I Did

Aside from the aforementioned GitHub learning I also refreshed myself (practically relearned) the Particle Playground system by reading the manual and watching some tutorials (1 hour)

I then dove into making the kamikaze explosion particles. At first I tried to make a burst of about 1000 particles  simulate the explosion, but I found that it just did not look good at all, and at a distance the explosion (because of the yellow-green color) was sort of hard to see. I then decided to try a sprite sheet. After using my photoshop knowledge to work on the sprite sheet and make it the appropriate color I ended up with this.

Though I'm not entirely sure if the group will approve of it yet it really is visible, and looks much better than what I was trying to do before. The best part is that explosion is only 8 particles. I made two different versions of the spreadsheet. The first one being just a green explosion, while the other is a crystalized version of the same explosion to try and fit the polyworld look of our game.

After that I started working on Crippler. I was trying to go for a lightning and acid type effect, and I even used a lightning material that made the particles have that sort of look, but again I ran into the problem of the attack not being seen well. I then did a lot of tweaking and exploration of the different materials to come up with an attack that looks very plasma like, and when in motion gives that kind of acid look to the particles which made me very happy. Hopefully the group will like as well. (The making of the particles took about 9 hours total)

What I'm Going to Do 

I'm going to continue working on refining and making particles.

Debrief not Deboxer

I have to seriously thank Kai-Lin for randomly talking about sprite sheets or else I may not have thought to use that, and also I played our game in a 4 player mode for the first time this week so that is amazing. 

MMMOOOAWWW PARTIKALLSS!!!

Accomplishments

• Used some time to mess around and study Particle Playground (2 hrs)
• Took a jab at Brigade unit Particles (3 hrs)

• Attempted in creating Gatling unit particles (4 hrs)

• Rigged and weight painted Brigade Unit (2 hrs)

• Started to animate Brigade Unit (1 hr)

Total Hours: 12 hours

Next Steps

• Edit the particles
• Finish animating first pass of Brigade Unit
• Rig and animate new models

Issues

• Still not very knowledgable with Particle Playground, but I did my best to try to get what I wanted.
• Had a lot of trouble trying to figure out what to do with Gatling's particles. Descriptions weren't very clear and there was confusion as to which part of the body it will shoot to attack. Had to make things up to see if it will work
• Spent a bit of time thinking about how I would rig Brigade Unit due to its design. But was able to figure out a way to make it work.

Last Minute Comments

Somehow I managed to meet the minimum requirement of work hours this week. YAY! Particles are hard....

Kai-Lin Chuang

What Got Done

• Lots of improvements related to networking.  This included fixing a issue with ping on Mac builds, adding password protection to games, preventing users from joining full games, lobby notifications for when the host leaves, and resolving some issues when trying to join games over LAN.
• Improved chat functionality.  You can now message your team or individual players.  
• Improved unit pooling to reduce the lag spike between waves even more.  Added support for superunits.
• Updated quite a few of our 3rd party assets and verified that they still worked.
• All towers with paths going to a base that is destroyed will now be rerouted to the nearest enemy base.
• Fixed some miscellaneous bugs from the playtesting session.
• Researched the possibility of using Unity 5's new lightmapping features to bake lightmaps for the static objects in the scene (i.e. the map).  I was unsuccessful since Unity does not expose the proper functions to allow that at runtime yet, but it is planned for the future.

What's Next

• Continuing Cory's work on the refactor of unit attacking states.  Once that is done I will be setting up an artist friendly script so they can start testing out their particles.
• More work on 8 player support.  We're nearly there.  One of the last major issues is figuring out what to do with units that are walking towards a base that has already been destroyed.  Hopefully we will find a decent solution this week.

Total time:  24 hours

I'm the Map

Accomplishments

Created 8 maps: 6 hours
refined, playtested, refined, playtested 3 of these maps: 7 hours
Reviews of work on slack: 30 minutes
minor ballancing: 45 minutes
Created Tower Building Particle Effect: 2 hours
reviewed tutorials for Particle Playground: 30 minutes

total: 16 hours 45 minutes

WIP

maps are still in the prototype phase and are functional but not pretty:
all of these maps were created with the intention of rewarding and enticing players to draw more (and more interesting) paths.
Ledges: This map has a number of directions from which to approach and makes tower placement more significant and in some cases punishing. Misplacing towers allows your opponent to sidestep them relatively easily. This is much more doable within the casual context of our game now that towers have range indicators showing how far out they can attack.

Backdoor: the Gygans are relatively close together, but the paths between them are much longer. Aggressive tower placements are limited and so predicting aggressive moves is a little easier. This rewards players who pay attention to their opponent.

The Peak: There is a central divider which is meant to be the area of conflict. Claiming control of the peak allows you to prevent enemies from taking the long way around. This map also has a few places to put towers that are very out of the way and much safer, which is not something many of the other maps provide.

more detailed write-ups will accompany additional playtest data.

also we have our first official fan art!

technically this is a playtester's example when explaining a concept but it's the closest we have so far.

Next Steps

I'm looking forward to seeing what particle work some of the other artists come up with and once sound is in the game the experience will be a lot richer. For me, I'm excited to refine the maps I've made and see different styles of play form around them. Additionally once Kail is implemented, I'll have a lot of balancing to do.