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.

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 #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.

Week #10: taking some time off

As the semestre comes to an end, I've taken the last week to focus on other projects and other responsibilities. Living in 2020 is harder than living inside '2036'.

Tomorrow, I'll create the overview of the narrative screen necessary to expose the history. I've talked about it with one of our artist and everything is already in motion.

May we meet next week, the last week of development before the MOJO event.

Week #9: More dots!

Figure 1 - New Overlay HUD, New Appreciatable Art, New Background Blur.

Hello gang,

I feel like I've been hit by a train. The development efforts really skyrocketed this week. I am so tired; I will keep it short. I've corrected an endless amount of bugs in the interaction system, in the pause game mechanic, in the HUD. That was the part that came naturally to me, as I am usually very proficient at fixing last-minute issues. The hard part included redesigning the Tooltiping System to allow more use cases, making it more flexible and more informative. I then connected the tool-tip system with Rafael's AI, so that the player knows he is being detected without using weird lanterns, even if the threat is not in his line of sight. Implementing an enter in closet mechanic, so the player has more places to hide, apart from usual WASD collider abusing. Applying a hug the wall mechanic, which was supposed to be a quick time event to perform last-second detection saving, but after extensive testing ended up being the traditional stuff that can be performed anywhere, a hit box with cover tag is available. I also brainstormed with Rafael, ways of improving his AI, which is right now still a work in progress. Cleaned up old code, increased performance on existing ones. Cleaning also included making ready-to-use prefabs both for decorative as well as functional purposes.

Figure 2 - New Cover Mechanic

Figure 3 - New Detection Hints

Many other things I do not remember right now. For example, a fade screen animation, to compensate for the fact that player changing clothes is just an instantaneous model switch.  Another blur background animation to be used along with newly created interactable classes that allow the player to appreciate art posters, read books, among others.
That's "basically" it — bye guys.

Figure 4 - More prefabs, more prefabs...