Last blog with last months progress

This last blog update will contain everything from the last four weeks that should have been blogged on a weekly basis.  So in no particular order here is what I’ve  been tasked to do in the last month.

I had been charged to unwrap a whole load of assets and texture them as I go; once done upload them onto the online drop box that we have set up.

Some of the textures that were unwrapped and textured are: the floor texture, the end gate asset and texture, the bowl and texture, broken bottle unwrap, the cheese grater asset unwrap and many more.

Also all the assets were divided three ways between Sam, Adam and myself, we each loaded the textures onto the assets, took a screen shot of them and then added the file names of both the asset and the texture. The image is at the top and the relevant information underneath the image. 

During the final stages of project blend, I’d played through a hand full of the last builds from 20 all the way up to the latest one. Each time taking notes of the bugs and passing the paper to the others to try and reduce the bug count.

Lastly I proof read the final document and edited a few chapters with the amendments that myself and the other group member who proof read the document found.

Play Test for Build 20

There are a whole host of moving bugs, there are a vast amount of objects that Logan bounces off of in many ways, as follows:

The steak at the start of the level if “down” is pressed; Logan continues to run until the end of the steak sometimes walking off of the edge.
Not 100% certain how regular or what is the actual trigger, as it seems to happen randomly even though the start place is the same and the movement button is only pressed once.

As Logan walks through the lanes, in all sections of the level. There are multiple points where an asset intersects two lanes, if either the up or down keys are pressed (Depending on where the Assets is in relation to Logans current location) Logan will walk into the asset and bounce back.
For example if Logan is in Lane 2 and there’s a slice of Pizza half in lane 2 and in lane 3. If the player pressed “Up” then Logan will attempt to walk to the third lane but bounce back off of the asset that is in his way.

The fix to this problem is to move around the positions of the assets so that they correspond to the same X & Y co-ordinates as the lanes.

There are also a few places where Logan can fall through the individual assets and become stuck inside the two, so the player can’t get back out without having to restart the level.
The places where this was found to have happened are:
In-between the battery and Bottle cork.

In-between a battery and Bottle Cap

In-between the Egg Cup and Coke Can.

The fix for this is simple just replace the colliders with the relevant ones to ensure the player can’t either fall through or walk into assets and become stuck.

Also as already touched upon in previous play tests the jumping is still clunky. (Still needing to be fixed – I’ve decided to mention it again because it’s got much worse in the respect that it happens on more assets and more NPC’s are far more regularly)  Logan will sometimes randomly jump up an object when in midair causing him to jump again throwing him right up into the air. It’s not just assets that this happens to it’s the NPC’s as well.

Also the movement is clunky with regards to the jumping. Sometimes like the encounter with the Elite as the player gets half way up they have to jump just right to get up the plates otherwise there’s no jump or movement at all Logan just stands there like the player is not pressing anything.
Same happens when slightly further up when on the bottle cap. When Logan is standing on the bottle cap there are a lot of key presses that go unregistered, and sometimes even the down key that the player wants doesn’t seem to work; if the player tries jumping and holding down this still doesn’t work as Logan just jumps straight up and back down.

Build 16 - Thoughts and Feelings

Handling / Gameplay

Apart from some jumping issues and collision issues with the avatar, movement is good and works very well. It has changed from our original vision of movement in lanes but it works much better with free roam movement, as the avatar has a much smoother motion.

The jumping is of a nice height and length. It doesn’t look unrealistic even though the height of the jump is high and wide, this helps to jump over most of the obstacles in the game and eliminates irritating sections where you fall and have to start again.

It’s not to high that all the jumps are easy, the player still has to concentrate but it’s no longer overly difficult. The player is free to concentrate on the assassinations and other gameplay elements.

Textures

There doesn’t seem to be much continuity when it comes to textures as there is a miss match of colours everywhere. There was a colour palate drawn up before texturing began, but evidently not everyone who has been doing the textures has been following the colours originally assigned.

Bugs

1. Logan jumps twice randomly, jumping up the more complex of the games jumping sections caused Logan to double jump even though the space bar (Executes the Jump command) was only pressed once.

In addition to this the wall bounce back is still present, if the Avatar collides with the wall before it gets to the top of it Logan will bounce backwards.

2. There are certain sections of the game environment that Logan will get stuck in and all movement is completely frozen. This only happens with the assets that run at odd angles and the character can fall in-between them causing movement to stop.

3. Logan has a whole host of problems that revolve around charging the sword.

When Logan is charging his sword his movement is restricted and this indirectly causes problems with all the games terrain that’s not perfectly horizontal. Also charging is canceled when falling off of terrain and if you move before you release the charge button.

Project Blend Playtesting Build 14 Michael and Alan – Movement and jumping

Movement Speed tests

We played through and decided to try and make Logan move faster so we changed the movement speed from 350 to 650.

650 was to so fast, it was possible to run past all types of enemies and not have to confront them.

So we decided to move it back down to 500. We noticed it was still too fast and some of the jumping puzzles were made unnecessarily tricky due to the speed of movement. Causing the player to either jump late or miss-judge some of the jumps.

Next we tried 400 it solved the jumping puzzles meaning that the player can still jump around with precision and move faster between objects in the level.

Fixing Tests

Ground Friction 1.15

At 3.00 it was far too slow

1.30 – The animations play smoother and it seems to be a nicer frame rate.

We then tried to see 1.25 but the animation went back to being a bit clunky and the animation went back to bobbing. So it has been decided that 1.30 is the best ground friction frame so far.

Current Setting: Move Speed = 400/ Ground Friction = 1.30

Jumping

Air Speed = 350.

Air Speed = 400 We changed it so that it was equal to the movement speed . and it worked pretty well but we wanted to see if we increased it a bit more that it would help with the jump.

So the Air Speed at 450 makes things a lot easier, jumping across the levels jumping puzzles, maybe to easy we want the jumps to be tricky but not so much that they annoy the player or get in the way to much.

Jumping Height

Jumping height = 450

475 improved

We wanted to make the jump as high as possible so stop the player having to repeatedly spamming the space bar to jump up an object.

We went to 500 but it proved to be too much so we changed it back to 475.

And we tried to jump up object that had an angle and because of the following two function

Slide angle 0.15

Slide force 120

We had problems as the spatula we were trying to jump up was in-between jumps sliding us back down meaning more jumps to reach the top of the object.

Life would be much easier if we took a banjo kazooie approach to this project either there’s slip and we can’t do up the object or there’s no slip atall.

We changed the air speed to 370 to compensate for the increased jump height to 475.

So that the player can’t cover too big a gap with each jump.

Gravity Strength -20

We changed it to -27

We tried it a little higher but the character didn’t jump very high off of the ground and at -30 the player sprite just seemed to shake up and down violently and quickly.

But after a few play testing sessions we changed a few things and then noticed that the player bounced off of most of the object populating the world. And couldn’t cover the gaps in the game and eventually we worked out that it was the gravity that was doing it as the player was returning to the ground faster than he could jump up an object so we changed it back to -20.

When gravity was set to -25, jump height had to be set to at least 495. However airspeed (which is 370) is now too weak to make jumps.

Airspeed barely works at 400 but it seems this won’t work any higher. Air resistance will have to be altered next.

Air Resistance

Originally 1.5 it was altered to 0.5, however this completely broke the game as the play flew through walls.

At 1.0 it works but there is not enough resistance. It works pretty well at 1.2.

Other issues

If gravity is too high, players smash into walls when using shifts and as a result bounce against the wall.

Conclusion

When gravity was increased to -25 it made jumping more believable and smooth, not the slow float as it looked like before. But to compensate for this increased gravity; the airspeed had to be increased drastically and air resistance had to be decreased by a small amount. As a result, the jumping feels a little too fast and free like being blown away by wind. This will need to be revived at a later date.

Textures

In today meeting the team showed off a full level five but there was a lot of place holders and untextured assets, so the next job is to start finishing off the interface and add textures.

Interface designs

We talked through the research I had gathered and started to make plans for which idea to implement for the health bar. We decided on making a gradient map with images of a full health bar and an empty one. As shown below in figures 1 to 3.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Textures 

I was originally assigned three textures to draw and upload to the drop box but after I finished the first one, (Even though I told the rest of the team those were the ones I was doing) I found that the other two I was going to do were already done.
This has been happening for the last few weeks and it's also happening to other team members; tasks are being assigned and others are deciding to do them and no bother telling the person who was originally assigned them that they have been done.

Figure 4 - Knife and Bread Textures

Interface - Various Backgrounds

So I have further edited the background that was selected my Sam and myself. I've added a basic vine outline in figure 1 and various other kitchen bits and bobs in figures two through to five.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

There will be more designs drawn up, but yet again it's time to show the team and see what they think.

Interface In-development

So I got to the guys house and started work talking about which design is best and we decided that we like figure 5 and 6 so I joined the two together, shown below. 

Figure 1 Distorted and Distressed