Week 13: Refinements and Development

After receiving some feedback from Steve during lab, we made some selective cuts from our levels so that our interactions would become more about developing the players’ relationship with Frend than anything else. We revisited our level layouts and modified our original jellyfish food and boulder puzzle ideas to revolve more around interacting with Frend to remove obstacles in the players’ way. One of these new puzzles now requires Frend to hand the player rocks which the player can then throw at large jellyfish to get them to move out of the way, while the other requires Frend to save the player from large vines that surround the players’ ship at the end of the game. Towards the end of the week, Dom began laying out the environment – based on these refinements – of our second stage within Unity.

We also continued modelling our assets, including building on the design and implementation of the spaceship. Quinn and Jules worked together to design the overall color scheme of the ship, while Melissa continued modelling and texturing it in Maya. We will also be animating vines for our final level later, as seen within the concept art below.

In addition, a few of our team members encountered more issues with the skin weights in Frends’ model, so a majority of the weekend was spent working to fix that so we could begin animating. Quinn also worked to create blend shapes for animations to do with facial expression in Frends’ eyes.

In general, we worked to completely organize ourselves for the next week to come before our final project is due. Marie created a document listing the sequence of events that will happen throughout our VR experience so that we could easily keep track of what still needs to be done. We also created a timeline of deadlines so that we will ideally have adequate time for playtesting and adjustments before our showcase. Minh continued working on scripting and interactions within Unity.