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.

Going to the Championship!

Late post because Drexel roller hockey had our play offs games today. We won both and are going to the championship round!

Documentation is getting a checkup tomorrow, so that was my big task this week. I also moved some things around with the attacking scripts and now the transitions from attack-to-idle-to-attackAgain/walk looks a little bit better. I just need to get the attacks to line up with the animations now and we should be good.

Documentation is "due" next week. I will be hammering that out (hopefully early in the week) so that we don't have to worry about that anymore until the final check at the end of the term.

What Was Done:

Syncing states (4hrs)

Docs (7hrs)

What I'm doing:

Docs

Lining up Attacks with animations cycles

Kail Again

Spring colds are not fun.

Accomplishments

• Kail (6 hours)
• Draft 08
• Draft 09
• Draft 10
• Ortho 04

WIP Screenshot

• Kail
• 01
• 02
• 03
• 04
• 05

Next Steps

• Kail Ortho
• Brigade SU and Tower
• Environment Help

Debrief

Kail is almost done. I will be finishing up his design and adding it to this post probably in about an hour or so. Next, I will be working on the Brigade SU and Tower. The Gatling line I passed over to Henderson so that all the new concept art and designs will be finished by the end of this week at the very latest. With that, the team will have enough time to model, rig, and animate.

After all my concept art duties have been fulfilled, I will be mainly focused on helping out in whatever areas I can such as environment and marketing.

Desiree Ann Lim

It's spring and we're fresh out of whale puns

Our team recently went through a minor restructuring of the art team. With our senior project coming to a close, we're looking to work on items that will really build the player experience. The three big things are particles, environment, and audio. 

During our meet, each sub-unit catered towards asset production, particles, and environment came up with a weekly work plan. Members that have acquired new roles, either from taking on a new role or re-acquiring roles they were taken off of, have to meet the deadlines they set for themselves or they will be released from the new responsibilities. This restructuring gives members an opportunity to break the monotony of their roles thus far while still pushing the project forward.

With Steve on our team and Alex back from break, we'll be making significant efforts towards audio in our game. In addition Alex will be helping us with our marketing efforts to bring pools of people to our senior show.

This term will be a rather exciting one!

Diving into the sea

Producing Things

• Particle meeting with Kai-Lin and Miguel (1.5)
• Meeting with Steve about sound effects (1.5)
• Meeting with Dylan and Kai-Lin about particle pipeline (1.5)
• Refund gathering for CS (1)
• Cleaning up Slack and follow up (2.5)
• Grand plan for the term and cross check with senior project class schedule (2.5)
• Modeling Brigade (1.5)

Total: 12

Works in Progress

Our asset list can be found here.

Trello Board of tasks to be completed each week

Brigade model

Foreseeing the Future

• Model Kail, Brigade Superunit, Brigade Tower, Gatling Unit, Gatling Superunit, Gatling Tower
• Prepare for video shoot on Tuesday

Pew pew pew.

Did a lot of concept art for gatling

Finish Line

• Gatling Drafts (7.5 Hrs)
• JLA Image/ Posing (2 Hr)
• Total - 9.5 Hrs

Progress

Gatling Unit CA:

• Draft 07
• Draft 08
• Gif
• Draft 09
• Draft 10
• Draft 11

Gatling Tower CA:

• Draft 01

Battle Plan

• Edit finished marketing photo
• Whatever else is on the list for concept art
• Look up ways to spice up the GUI
• Animations

Damage Control

• Gotta do more concept art!

tl;dr

Got work done, gotta speed things up. Again.

-Henderson

Retro-action

Accomplishments

playtested and revised maps: 3 hours
created maps: 5 hours
unit ballances: 1 hour

total: 9 hours

WIP

Creating maps is fun!
the game is slowly becoming balancing.
and different maps encourage different play-styles.

Next Steps

There is a lot of design potential in map design. Which is rewarding to see. However through experimentation, some limitations to the map editor have been found (documentation and discussion will be available at the next meeting). Speeding up the process would also be nice, and since Dylan loves his map editor I'm sure he'd like to talk about ways we could improve it. Additionally once I have a few really developed maps I'm going to talk about ways of making them prettier and if that might require some work outside of the map editor. This will tie into the talks I'll be having with Miguel and Henderson about environment design, more specifically environment particles.

Debrief

coming into a more level design focused role has been nice. And once I got the project up to date I've had very few problems with Git, which was hugely rewarding after having that be a major pain in my side last term. I'm also glad to see maps having a large effect on gameplay. I was worried that different maps would only have minor impacts on where things were built. 

Hands dirty with particles

Accomplishments

• Looks at tutorials and manual for Particle Playground (1.5 hrs)
• Played with Particle Playground and tried making stuff for sniper unit attack particles (4 hrs)

• Made playblasts of the animations we currently have and uploaded to Google Drive for Steven to use as reference to make sound effect (.5 hrs)

Total: 6 hours

Next Steps

• Continue with particles
• Rig and animate new models

Last Minute Comments

Better progress this week, unable to meet the minimum requirement. I participated in FJORG! animation jam this weekend so wasn't really able to keep up with the work.

Kai-Lin Chuang

What Got Done

• New health bars and unearth indicators.  We wanted a new type of radial health bar that would show the player how much health the unit/tower/base had relative to other units/towers/bases.  Dividing the health bar into segments based on how much health the unit/tower/base had turned out to be the best way to show that.  Unfortunately the current solution we were using for health bars would not allow for that, so I started from scratch.  I was able to get something decent with Line Renderers but they had issues when the camera moved and the edges would not line up properly.  

First draft with LineRenderers

After that didn't work out too well I looked into a procedural mesh with a procedural texture.  I was able to get a customizable torus shape fairly easily with an acceptable UV mapping.  Then I tried a few texture variations to see what would work well with that mesh.  A texture with a thin horizontal strip of white in the middle and a few very thin black vertical lines produced this result.

Procedural mesh, hand made texture

Luckily all I needed to do to add the segments was to add evenly spaced vertical black lines to the texture.  This was definitely doable via code.  After a few iterations and some polish, this was the result in game.

Procedural health bars in game

• Lots of networking fixes based off play-testing sessions from last week and this week.  The first thing that I got working was having all of the players rejoin the lobby after the game after it ends.  What sounds like a fairly simple task actually ended up being pretty difficult because of a limitation of TNet.  When you start a game we make the game private in TNet and remove it from the master server to prevent anyone else from joining.  The problem is that once you make a game private, there is no way to make it public again.  So at the end of the game, everyone will disconnect, while the host automatically starts up a new game and all of the clients rejoin.  I also moved some of our remote function calls that get called very frequently from TCP to UDP.
• Started working on laying more groundwork for supporting 8 players.  Originally, when you would place a tower the path would autocomplete to the nearest enemy base.  Once that endpoint was set you couldn't change it.  Now when you are editing a path, it will autocomplete to the nearest enemy base from where your mouse is.  This is a big first step for making 8 player games work but there is still much to do.  I also reconfigured how we were assigning bases at the beginning of the game to allow for testing 8 player games on 1 machine.
• Wrote a document explaining in detail how networking works in Gygan Reign.

What's Next

• More work on 8 player support.
• Continuing tests on networking.

Total time:  37 hours

I Just Sneezed and It Hurt

Last week we had a quick meeting with Salvage, and our documentation (SRS, DD, ATP) are all due around week 5. Sooo... That'll pretty much be my life.

I also did some work on AI this week, though I went home pretty early in the week for Easter so I didn't get as much done as I had hoped.

Side note - Happy Easter!

Basically I'm trying to get the animations to sync up correctly with the AI states (shooting, walking, idle/reloading), and in order to do that the attack methods need to be reconfigured. I'll be working on that this week as well.

WHAT I DONE:

AI work (2hrs)

Reconfiguring Controllers (1hr)

Docs, docs, docs (3hrs)

Backlogging time for the CS presentation (6hrs)

WHAT I'M DOING:

Animation Syncing

Attack reconfiguring

DOCS, DOCS, DOCS

P.S. No but seriously that sneeze did a number on me.

"fin"ale

Accomplishments

playtest session: 3 hours
playtest data review: 1 hour
small scale playtest (includes time over break): 2.5 hours
trying to get unity 5 project working for balancing: 2 hours

total: 8.5 hours

WIP

gonna keep tweaking testing and playtesting until the game is balanced.

Next Steps

Upgrading the UI to give the player more information will help with a lot of the uncertainty in the feedback we received during the session. Additionally the game will need to both be balanced and appear balanced. If the players feel like something is OP even if it's not, that can be just as big of a problem as a statistical inbalance.

Debrief

The playtest session was the most condensed form of progress I've felt since very early on in the project. It was great to hear so many informed opinions and the feedback was crazy valuable. I look forward to continuing to iterate while conducting more testing sessions to bring this game to a glorious conclusion!

Beginning of the End

ITS HERE!

Finish Line

• Icon Mockups (2.5 Hrs)
• Research Icons (1 Hrs)
• Angu CA (1.5 Hrs)
• JLA Image/ Posing (4 Hrs)
• Total - 9 Hrs

Progress

Icons Mock ups:

• Draft 01

JLA image:

• WIP (working on colors)

Angu:

• Draft 05

Battle Plan

• Finish up JLA image
• Whatever else is on the list for concept art
• Look up ways to spice up the GUI

Damage Control

• Since we're no longer doing Angu, I'll do my best to work with stuff for the GUI and perhaps Kail if I'm needed.

tl;dr

Got work done, gotta speed things up.

-Henderson

Whales in the House, part some number after 1

Spring term has just begun and there is a whole ton of things to do. Now that we are back from GDC, we'll be moving towards the long term track that was discussed in previous posts.

Kail, the Desperate

With most of the units, superunits, and towers are at a great spot, we are moving forward with developing Kail as our second Gygan. Some work was done prior to our trip to GDC during the Fall and Winter terms. We were able to pick up from that and start finalizing some of the concept art to move the asset into the pipeline. Brigade unit is done and we'll be moving full steam ahead with bringing another Gygan into the game.

GUI, GUI, GUI, GUI Everywhere

Going into GDC, we designed an interface that was just "good enough" to make the game look finished. Now that we're back, we will be addressing some of the feedback we received from those who saw our game at GDC, faculty, and our advisor. We addressed key issues during our first meeting back and have some solutions which Dylan will be spearheading.

Senior Show

While we work on content for the game, Senior Show is a massive marketing effort that will require a little bit more planning than what we pull off for GDC. We're planning on designing another round of promotional items in addition to fulfilling some of the requirements of the class, such as the video recording in two weeks, deadlines for the class, etc.

Ramping up

Producing Things

• Follow up on Slack and planning out meetings (1.5)
• Meeting with Dylan about art assets and issues we need to work on (1.5)
• Digital Media refund (1)
• Computer Science refund (2)

Total: 6

Our asset list can be found here.

Foreseeing the Future

• Meeting with Kai-Lin and Miguel on particle orientation
• Meeting with Steven about sound effects
• Lab date with the team Tuesday morning
• Meeting with Kai-Lin, Miguel, and Dylan on particle pipeline
• Model Brigade and hopefully Kail
• Set goals for the team and the following week

This week was fairly light as was full of more tasks oriented to getting everyone started. I wasn't able to meet my 12 hours for the first week but I am fully aware that there a ton of things to be done. One of the things that Stefan wants rather soon is a grand plan of the term.

Unfortunately....

Accomplishments

• Posed Augher and fixed some weightpainting issues. Handed off to Henderson to use (.5 hr)
• Skimmed through the current animations (.5hr)

Total: 1 hour....

Next Steps

• Work on particles with Miguel and Anna
• Check up our current UI stuff and see if there is anything I could do

Last Minute Comments

This week... Huh.... I didn't do much... Going to meet with Anna and Miguel tomorrow to go over the particles tomorrow. I'm going to pick up my pace for next week.

Kai-Lin Chuang

Back From The Easter Bunny's Clutches

First off Happy Easter everybody! This was the first week back from break, and unfortunately I did not get anything accomplished aside from getting situated for the new term, but it's time to get back to business.

What I Did 

Discussed about particles needed for the units, ideas for the kinds of particles, and when the particle team will meet

What I'm Going To Do 

Meet with the particle team tomorrow afternoon and working on needed particles for our game throughout the week

Back from break

What Got Done

This is what I accomplished over the last week and during break.

• Unity 5 upgrade.  We have officially switched over to Unity 5.  Most of the upgrade went pretty smoothly but we did have to make some manual changes.
• Networking bug fixes based on error logs from Google Analytics.
• Maps are now compressed and sent over the network to ensure that every player is playing on the same map.
• Bug fixes for the map editor.  Also added functionality to show you exactly which objects are invalid (if any).
• Added networked chat to the lobby and in-game.  This is just a first draft.  Team chat, private chat and polish still to come.
• Our input manager was refactored to allow for remappable controls and suspending input.  
• Spent a decent chunk of time fixing bugs related to playing the game more than once (without quitting and restarting the application).  Most of these seemed to be related to persistent objects and the limitations of our Singleton class.
• Refactored the Singleton class to give us more control over persistent objects and which instance to use when more than one instance exists.
• Attempted to upgrade our PolyWorld asset to the newest version that is Unity 5 ready.  Either it wasn't importing correctly or the asset was bugged because it didn't work at all (pink materials, empty scenes and prefabs, etc.).
• Added a list of players in the game to the in-game HUD.  (Press Tab)
• Set up the foundation of an options menu for the main menu and in-game.  Right now it just has video and audio options and saves your preferences even through multiple sessions.
• Range indicators.  You can now see just how far that unit/tower/superunit can attack.  Just click on any unit/superunit/tower to see their attack range.  When placing towers you also see the tower's attack range.  When drawing a path you can see the unit's attack range.
• Added a class to interface with GoogleFu so we don't have messy GoogleFu code polluting our game classes.

What's Next

• Improvements on chat, range indicators, networking and playing the game multiple times.
• New health bars.

Total time:  52 hours

Return of the Kail

It's been a while, but the start of our last quarter has begun. That means there's only about 5 weeks left to make any big changes to our senior project. We chose to continue with Kail's design over Angu's and I'm responsible for designing Kail and his respective towers and units.

Accomplishments

• Brigade Unit (1.5 hours)
• Draft 07
• Draft 08
• Kail (1.5 hours)
• Draft 07

WIP Screenshot

• Brigade Unit
• 01
• 02
• 03
• 04
• Kail
• 01
• 02
• 03

Next Steps

• Kail
• Brigade SU and Tower
• Gatling U, SU, and Tower

Debrief

I did not get much done this week with my running around trying to fix my schedule, I will really need to give it my all to push through. The Brigade Unit has been approved, so I can move on with solidifying the design for Kail and continuing on the Gatling while starting on the Brigade's Tower and Super Unit designs too.

There won't be class this week, but I'll definitely be utilizing that time with my team to design and quickly go through iterations so that hopefully we all approve of the designs.

Desiree Ann Lim