Narrative and Design

Timing-Based Levels

For this sprint, three new levels were created with an emphasis on timing.  In order to create this emphasis, the first of the three levels require the player to stagger their movement between multiple boulders.  These boulders kill the player if touched and must be avoided.  While avoiding them, the player also needs to reach the end of the level before the boulders permanently bar the end of the level from being accessed.  I also worked on creating a level storyboard for our game.  This storyboard gives us a road map for the final levels of our project.  With this we will be able to create themed levels that incorporate our idea of progressive overload. 

Voice Acting and Foley Art

The last tasked worked on was voice acting for our enemies.  The two designers, Michael and Brian, and our artist, Austin, contributed their voices as well for our enemies, while our engineer, Doug, handled the sound engineering and recording.  Xander, our main boss, was voiced solely by Brian who had a blast making a deep voiced, evil man come to life with heckling statements and evil laughter.  Said Brain as he reflected on the experience, “I had a tough time getting into the voice acting when I noticed people walking outside the room.  Getting self-conscious, I had to re-do many lines and it took getting over myself to finish out the last of the lines for Xander.” 

Another issue was with the boulders.  Those boulders were not affected by gravity and rolling when the collider was set to be a trigger.  So, it was either a boulder that did nothing on impact and rolled properly, or a death ball that just fell out of the sky.  An initial solution was just adding another, separate collider to split up the gravity and death ball functions.  I did not think this would work but to my surprise it worked like a charm.  So much head scratching for such a simple solution.

For future sprints, more work will be done on creating and implementing our final levels needed to finish our road map.  Re-doing any voice lines that need to be corrected, and small changes to enemies as needed.

SHMUP Level Design

This sprint’s challenge was to create a SHMUP style level using the game’s existing mechanics.  This aligned with the project’s goal of creating multiple level types to create a variety of experiences for the player.  The existing gliding mechanic was used for horizontal flight, and a new “flapping” mechanic was added to allow vertical movement.  Combining these movement abilities with the existing ability to aim and shoot ranged projectiles provided the baseline mechanics for the level.

Traditionally, SHMUP games focus on intense action and quick reflexes to defeat multiple waves of enemies.  This modified, SHMUP-inspired proof of concept design focuses more on the strengths of the game, relying more on strategy and risk management.  While there are enemies present, both stationary and flying, the player must also navigate several environmental hazards such as damaging tiles and energy management.  Because gliding consumes energy, to assist the player navigate the level there are several energy refill pickups as well as places for the player to stop and let their energy refill.

This sprint went well; however, it will be the last sprint for implementing new level styles like the SHMUP idea.  With the existing concepts and mechanics, a storyboard has been created, and a 25-level goal has been set.  The focus of this upcoming sprint will be on creating levels and QA.

Art and QA

My time was spent creating new artwork for the Bedroom Levels by creating backgrounds and a new tileset to go with those levels.  I also repurposed previously made tiles to create blocks that would be easily identifiable as breakable for the purpose of communicating things to the player.  A new set of Bubble sprites were created to replace the previous Explosion sprites as the initial sprites did not mesh well with the game’s theme.

Animation work was done on the Vacuum Dragon to replace previous still and awkward movement.  Burn Block tile set created so that it animates instead of being still, giving a clearer idea to the player on what the tile will do.  Started basic animation work for the Final Boss Xander.

Future work will involve finalizing any remaining artwork and animations.  The primary focus, though, will be moved more toward testing and bug finding as the game’s production will be reaching its end.

Making It All Work

Sound Engineering

One workday was dedicated to the recording of all sound effects (SFX) for the enemies through voicing or foley art.  Both a condenser mic for voice recording and a dynamic mic for more aggressive SFX were deployed.  A shot list was made for all the requisite sounds for all the enemy entities.  All the raw audio was successfully recorded and all sounds for the FireFly and StoolPigeon enemies have been processed and incorporated into the game.

Improved Game Mechanics, Visuals, and Controls

There were several changes that were made to improve the overall visual appeal of the game and to improve the control system.  To facilitate player control for a SHMUP-esque level, the player needed to fly, not just glide.  We achieved this by implementing a FlappyBird-style mechanism by which the player can give themselves a boost of altitude by hitting the attack button while gliding.  The aiming of the mister weapon was also divorced from the movement controls.  The left stick now only controls the movement, while the right stick now controls the aiming.  This control scheme works well while on the ground, but it is a bit awkward to use while gliding.  We will reconsider this control scheme next sprint and entertain different configuration options.

To improve the visuals of faster moving objects such as player and enemy projectiles, a trail renderer was added.  This allows the player to detect and track incoming enemy missiles more easily and to improve their aim while tracking their own missile.  A trail renderer was also placed on the Player Character, Elaine.  This trail is only active while the player is dashing to provide stronger visual feedback.

The new special terrain prefabs were created with the new sprites.  Appropriate colliders and physics materials were placed on the prefab object.  The breakable block has the ElementalLock script placed on it so that it will be destroyed if hit sufficiently with the broom.  The ElementalLock script was modified to provide the additional functionality of having the object damageable only by melee attack and invulnerable to ranged attacks.  The fire block has a DeathTrigger script on it currently, but in testing, it is not behaving as desired.  We will place the DoDamage script on it instead.  This will deal damage to the player over time while they’re in contact with the fire block.  It will also require modifying the colliders.

Control Rebinding

It has become evident that control rebinding needs to be an integrated part of the software design from the beginning of the project.  Retroactively adding a rebinding feature requires significant rewriting of code that already works well.  At this late stage of the development process, we feel that more value will be added to the game by focusing on improving existing features rather than adding a new rebinding feature.

Engineering Goals for Next Sprint

The engineering goals for the upcoming sprint are in setting the right behaviour for the new level geometry elements, polishing the behaviour of existing entities and items, and processing the remaining raw SFX audio.  We have updated level geometry sprites that need colliders and physics materials specified.  Since these new sprites fill the frame of the sprite boundary rather than having a significant amount of surrounding transparency as the current sprites do, the existing levels will need to be edited to account for the new spacing.  The remaining raw audio of the recorded voice over work and SFX work will be processed, imported into the project, and applied to the appropriate entities.  The completion of this work will not require any further changes within the individual levels since this will not affect any other behaviours of the entities.