Advanced Design Week 16 - Retrospectives

This week is retrospectives for Advanced Design, and here I am doing this last blog at 1AM the night before.. Oh well.

I believe that I drastically improved my value to the team this second half of the semester. The first half of the semester I was definitely coasting. I'm not sure if that was because I was indifferent, if it was my first design class, or I was just a jaded douchebag. Either way, I think I really turned it around like I wanted to after midterms.

I added several quality features to our race, all of which made it into the final Codex (with a few changes made along the way obviously but they are more or less close to how I initially designed them). I also helped to playtest and balance an incredibly large portion of the mechanics for the Lizardmen.

Warning: Big block of text incoming

I definitely am incredibly proud of myself for the change I made and hopefully my feeling is reflected in the score I receive! Having said that, I would give myself a 4. I believe I 100% met expectations for what I was supposed to do as a member of the mechanics team and as assistant mechanics lead. I would say I was still a little weak on my communication outside of class (G+), but it was definitely a drastic improvement from the first half of the semester. My attendance improved (actually was on time every day I think) and I also attended the optional playtesting sessions on Fridays. I think my intellectual curiosity was there, as I spent quite a long time researching the different tasks I was assigned, including the Hwacha and how formations work. My body of work is good, it included the Fury Launcher, formations, the Temple Guard, Terradon Flyers, a few psychic abilities, and I also managed a lot of the management of the mechanics spreadsheet making sure it was organized and easily usable by someone that wasn't on the mechanics team. My attitude improved, although I did still have issues with Sean, but overall I think I had a better/good attitude.

That's all folks!

Capstone Week 16.5 - Demo Day

This post is for the large amount of work I did the night before Demo Day. Throughout that night I added/fixed the following things:

• Add Wreck-uisition splash screen
• Add Main Menu sound and intro "animation"
• Fleshed out character customization and moved it into Main Menu scene
• Filled in Credits
• Replaced button graphics

The splash screen looks great, it was a pain finding out that Unity uses Quicktime (yes that Apple program) for importing/handling video in-engine. Hopefully that doesn't cause problems... (foreshadowing). 

The Main Menu sound/music sounds great. Matt did a great job of coming up with some cool music for us. I can't wait to hear what else he has in store for us as the rest of the game progresses. The intro animation and sound start playing after the Wreck-uisition splash screen. 

I moved Character Customization into the main menu scene. It is now properly held within the loadout area (dark side of the planet). It all works great, and the players load into the game with the proper items/abilities.

I filled in the Credits screen so each of our names were shown on screen for everyone to see! It looks good, also it will HAVE to be made more transparent in the future so you can see the beautiful lens flare. No joke.

Little less exciting, but I replaced the sprite that the buttons use so they look like they fit into the setting and aren't just the default Unity button sprite.

I'm done!!! Now to most likely do some more debugging tomorrow morning for Demo Day and then the semester is over (besides retros, but no biggie there).

Advanced Design Week 15 - The Big One

This week our army was to play 2 different games! One was Lizardmen (Ryan) vs. Tau (Sean) and the other was Lizardmen (Garrett) vs. Sisters of Battle + Inquisitors (Emil).

The Lizardmen actually won their game against the Tau due to getting more objective points than the Tau.

Unfortunately the Lizardmen lost to the Sisters of Battle and Inquisitors, but this was foreseen as the Inquisitors are very anti-psychic, while our army is psychic reliant. He also brought a Titan which is, ya know, okay I guess.

This week was a pretty lax final playtest, and next week we do retrospectives.

Capstone Week 16 - Damage Reflect Hack, Playtesting, Character Customization and Demo Day

This week the only new feature I worked on was the damage reflect hack. Once I completed that, I moved on to fixing the build so it works for playtesters and fixing any bugs they find.

The first item on that agenda was fixing the character customization so it could be properly used. This is adding on to the changes made last week, as there were still some issues I needed to work out with it.

Through playtesting, we found many issues with different abilities, weapons, and whatnot. We also got in the animations for weapons and whatnot and were testing how those worked in-engine. Everything worked pretty well.

The rest of this week will be spent getting the game ready for Demo Day. It's gonna be a late night...

Advanced Design Week 14 - More Playtesting...

This week was once again more playtesting, but do not fear! I took some more excruciatingly detailed playtesting notes!

Dec 3 Notes

These December 4th notes weren't mine but they were just as detailed. I was actually in control of my Imperial Guard army against the Lizardmen. I thought that the Lizardmen were definitely a strong opponent when up close to them, but when kept at a distance they fell before the might of THE IMPERIAL GUARD'S BALLISTICLY SUPERIOR ORDNANCE WEAPONS. DOWN WITH HERESY! Oh jeez, don't know what came over me there.

Dec 4 Notes

Capstone Week 15 - Level Importing, Backstab Hack, and Character Selection

This week was one hell of a week for getting work done.

First, I got the backstab hack card done. This one was actually fairly difficult as the attack that deals damage to a player had to know where the attack was on the player so it could check if the attack was a "backstab". This proved difficult as Unity has a weird way of handling angles on a player. So I had to do a lot of debugging and trial and error to find the correct way to go about this. The function is shown below for those curious.


Fun note: That question mark is fun C# operator I found out about called a conditional operator. Basically it tests whether or not the line of code to its left returns true or false, and returns the first option if its true, and the section option if its false. It is great for getting rid of pesky if-statements that only have one line of code in them.

I also fixed Character Selection so that it includes all of the hacks, viruses, weapons, and armor. Previously it had weapons, armor, and "terrain mods". The terrain mods no longer exist and obviously we need access to the other abilities for playtesting so this was a priority fix.

Finally, I also imported Mario's level he made in Axis Game Factory into Unity. It looks great, although it still needs some optimization on the Unity end so that it runs at >60 fps (hopefully).