Week #12: A late goodbye

Fellow readers,

This report is likely to be my last post on this blog. The writing experience lasted for approximately three months of my life. Just a few days back on the 26th of May, we had the first fully online MOJO event in history; the day was overall a joy. Our team participation involved three components. See players testing our game and giving us direct feedback about their experience. Playtesting other teams' games and watching online streams where the developers and artists of each team talked about their developing experience, their goals, and what they would have done differently.

Our interview was set for 12:30PM, and overall, the conversation went well. We answered the questions honestly and talked about our game very naturally. The only unfortunate part, as mentioned by other colleagues on their blog posts, was that the wrong trailers and gameplay videos were displayed on the event. The trailer presented was a 720p initial draft made by Sofia Santos, and the final trailer was way better. In this trailer, the sound was mastered. The image quality was 1080p, and there were subtitles for people who had trouble understanding spoken English and included some hero shots of our game, including levels that were not used in the event. This happened because of me. With the hurry to deliver everything by the end of the 25th of May, I accidentally submitted the trailer we had stored on GitHub. Instead, I should have provided the version I had stored locally, which could not be uploaded to GitHub because it was larger than 100MB. However, when it comes to the wrong gameplay trailer being displayed, it was the streamers' error. We submitted a way better version at approximately 10:30AM and signaled this at least twice throughout the morning. The improved version better displayed how the game should be played and enjoyed, instead of being a rough speed-run throughout the level. Alas, we are all human. If you are curious you can check the videos below. The first is the final game-play trailer and the second is the final presentation trailer!

Overall, this course and the MOJO event made me learn a lot about game development. Although it gave me lots of hard work and ultimately set me back on my thesis progress, I do not regret it for a single second. I even enlisted as a volunteer for Game Dev Técnico. Wink Wink. I also got to make new friends in other universities, and I am not regularly going out with one of them! For lack of better words, this was a 'game' changing experience! See what happens when game development joins together an engineer and an artist:

Figure 1 - Francisco and Sofia find happiness in each others' company

I wish you all the best,

See you next time.

Week #12: 👋👋

This is the end. Last week was the MOJO event, in which we showed the final version of our game to the other dev teams, play testing other games and receiving feedback and suggestions on what could be improved and what could be removed - there were things people didn't even notice.

The worst part of the MOJO event was the interview, definitely. We had to present our game and talk about it / answer the host's question on a live stream. I already don't like doing that, but the worst was finding out the trailer and gameplay video that was being shown in the background (while we talked) we're not the final versions. So:

Instead of the carefuully crafted and polished trailer, the livestream viewers saw what I can only describe as a storyboard of a video. A third of the video were black screens with a title card describing what should be shawn - "Level 2" / "Level 3 with waiter disguise". Regarding the gameplay trailer, instead of the 9 minutes target request, it was a 4 minute rough cut video, which, to make things worse, was recorded like the player was speedrunning the game.

Now to write the final report.

Finale: '2036' at the MOJO event

The MOJO event is finally past us. It was an incredible experience to try out my colleagues' games and to see my colleagues playing "2036".

A lot went wrong in the MOJO event: our final narrative trailer and gameplay trailer were switched with old versions at the event and the people watching the livestream didn't get to see the game as we wished (the trailers were really cool). But, nonetheless, it was important to hear the feedback.

In all honesty, I haven't looked at the logs we collected from the event, all I know is what the MDJ's students said about our game and the reaction was positive (we still didn't get the mouse sensitivity right though). People seemed to really like our setting and the look of the game. 

Now that we'll be writing the final report, we'll be looking at dozens of heatmaps and forms. I'm actually excited about writing the 'Postmortem' report because, looking back, there's a lot of things we would've done differently  (mostly, balance our ambition).

It was a pleasure writing this blog every friday.

I'll see you soon.

Week #11: final details

As we get to the finish line, it's time to finalize the dialogue. I wrote two dialogue trees: one for the General and other for the IT Guy. The first one needs a more defensive type of approach since the General is looking for suspicious behavior through all of the conversation and a wrong move gets you caught. The second one, it's a lot more exploratory: it's about engaging and guiding conversations for topics that are useful to the player. 

I found difficult to write dialogues since it's not really my strong suit but the final dialogue trees get the job done. 

Now... for the MOJO!

Weak #11: re-creating the dialogue system, more HUD, better information.

Figure 1 - Tutorial level, designed by Rafael Ribeiro

Squad...

The road so far was hard and full of perils, but the end boss is yet to be defeated. As MOJO approaches, we still need to create two exciting and playable levels, including a tutorial so that players can experiment with our game one "final" time. After that, we need to create a game-play trailer that is about 8 minutes long. But that's what we need to accomplish in the next 24 hours.

What I've done this week however, is another story.

I had to recreate the dialogue system, which was outdated, malfunctioning in a few aspects. Still, the most notable change was in the interface and how the player engages in the selection. The number of possible choices is still limited to three dialogue options. However, it is no longer required that the tree has precisely three possibilities. This should make the dialogue system less linear, and perhaps more exciting. The underlying system can easily be upgraded to have more choices. Still, the HUD would be cluttery, hence the imposed restrictions. We went from a cycle and mouse click to, W A D keypress selection, or alternately using arrow navigation and press enter selection.

Figure 2 - New dialogue HUD example. Following artists specification.

I also created the credits, intro, and trailer scenes in the game using our art student, Sofia, products. I also used her posters on our propaganda poster prefabs.

Figure 3 - Propaganda posters, by Sofia Santos. There is no better Art  collaborator.

I created a system that allows the user to select between game-pad and mouse + keyboard HUD at any time by accessing the pause menu or the main menu. The goal is to help the user better understand what he is doing. On that note, we now use icons to specify key-binds within the game instead of hardcoded strings. See Figure 2. Ideally, I would have liked for this to be dynamic concerning the "last used" device. Unfortunately, with the way we implemented the input controls, this would not be easily achieved in short notice.

Finally, I created a tutorial HUD and system that allows Rafael to give instructions to the player has he navigates the tutorial corridor, shown in Figure 1.

I could go on, but I have the stuff to do.

See you in two days.

Week #11: ⏳⏰⏳🚧⚒🛠🚧

This has been the last week of development before the MOJO event. As such, I've been working on building the levels and pretyfying the movement, the behaviors, and the overall game experience.

For the movement:

• the guards now have an animation to sit down and stand up, instead of snapping into the standing up pose and never sitting again.
• the player is teleported to inside the closet (in the Hide in Closet mechanic) because the animations from Mixamo - to open and close doors - didn't match our closet model, which has sliding doors instead of the needed (by the anims) rotating hinged doors. To make this look more normal, when the player interacts with the closet, the screen fades to black and "unfades" to the dedicated InCloset camera.

For the behavior:

• when a guard sees the player being chased by another guard, it will immediately start chasing the player as well. This was done to have the appearence of smarter guards.

For the game experience:

• there is now a loading screen displaying the awesome art (propaganda posters) made by our art team and random helpful tips such as short descriptions of the AI behavior or a phrase indicating what is the keyboard key / gamepad button for a certain action.
• the HUD now has arrows pointing in the direction of detecting enemies (when these are off screen) to help the player to not be blinded sided.
• the HUD now also has an indication of when the player is trespassing. We try to minimize the need for this with level design, implicitly showing what types of NPC / disguises can be in certain areas.

So this week was that and a whole lot of bug fixing and things you'll never notice, like good CG in movies or an Uber driver.

Week #10: Heatmaps, Maptracing and lots of HUD.

Figure 1 - Heatmap and Maptracer combined

Hello fellow followers,

Figure 2 - A small part of the new HUD.

Throughout the 10th week I have been busy constructing Heat-maps and Map Tracing to use during the play-tests of the game during MOJO. Once again I did refactoring to improve the performance of the game but my best work so far this week was to work directly with the arts 
student Sofia, to integrate her HUD and menu on our scripts. As well as creating with her a custom cursor and adding it to our game. She also made one .exe logo for us.

Figure 3 - Game Over Screen for defeat case. Victory is similar.

I also implemented a loading screen to make smoother transitions and which asks the player not to close the game while we write log files to disk and upload them to the cloud as backup. Apart from these I haven't done much else. This week's post has been short and there is not much more to say, mostly because doing the heat map and the map tracing took up most of my time.

See you soon at Mojo!

Figure 4 - Uploads to cloud, checked.