Week #3: all Over the Place

Hello gang,

This week has been a little intense; After finishing last weeks' tasks, my job was not very clear. I knew I had to build the scene in Unity, leveraging my colleagues' resources, but I did not know much else. When I started doing that task, I soon realized that we were using animated models instead of single models with animations. After conveying this to the group, Rafael agreed to fix that problem. Making our project more reusable, teaching us a new skill, and, most importantly, allowing us to use GitHub to its full potential. Using animated models was forcing us to pass .zip archives to one another like first graders. This also avoided accidental code loss and gave us off-the-shelf configuration whenever someone adds a new asset or element to the scene.

After making a basic scene, I realized we did not have the camera implemented yet, so I went ahead and made two versions of the camera, one using Lerp and another using SmoothDamp; Both suffered from the same issue. Rafael and I traced the problem back to the fact that our player's movement was based on the camera point of view, which is not what we wanted. Eventually, Rafael decided to make a movement that was independent of the camera, resulting in better, more flexible, and more readable. With Rafael's new motion and my camera follow algorithms, we now have a silky smooth character following using a top down-view, just like we wanted.

I decided to go back to the scene and add some mood to it. This involved doing more exciting lighting and give the demo some textures. As otherwise, NPCs and the Player would look like black umbrae, and the walls would be completely grey. Because last week's improved blender-made map was a single object, I had trouble applying textures and proper lighting. So I reopened Andreia's .blend file and sliced her artwork into several pieces that I then reimported to Unity. This allowed me to give different materials and textures to the wall and to the ground. I then decided to paint the shallow lake in the middle of the map with a different texture, as in real life, water does not look like ground. I also added the tanks, so the player as more places to hide and to give some extra mood to the scene. I also added an additional NPC with a quest mark on top, so that Andreia can use it demo the dialogue part of our game; I fixed drones', cameras' and guards' patrol lights in terms of intensity and angle, to provide a smoother experience and defined the guards' patrol routes for the player to be somewhat challenged by our prototype;

Last but not least, and this happened at the beginning of the week, I discussed with Rafael what our paper prototype would look like and implemented it, in parallel with the tech feasibility prototype, then carried on to record it's play-testing with five different persons, before passing all the videos to him for editing;

Oh yeah, and I also added colliders to all scene's objects, otherwise our player could hack is way through everything!

To summarize. My primary role in this week's development was mainly identifying missing game features and project level optimizations. Creating new issues on GitHub, which will lead to future improvements in our game. Some of these have already been implemented. I also fixing minor problems. Building and improving the scene. It is way better than the earlier version, and making it playable and, I hope, fun.