Apparently, the newly adopted Gantt strategy has turned up succesful, as we managed to finally complete Vertical Slice 2 and the team has entered the production stage. All the goals for the previous VS were accomplished, and despite some inconveniences with gameplay, sound design or game performance, we are set to go.
Coding
- With all the subsystems nearly implemented, the coding team is now focusing on providing tools for the designers and artists. This tools include an animation graph, which allows to have different animation states controlled from scripts. But there are also more general tools. Right now, the engine has a primary ctrl-z which allows to undo transform changes and some options from the components.
- Another important feature is the animation events, which allows the designers to place specific events ranging from particle triggering to script execution.
- The Physics have also been implemented, so interaction between enemies and the player is possible. This was a much needed feature, as, despite our game not using physics directly, colliders and triggers are everywhere, and the player movement needs some acceleration and rotation to look smoother.
- During the last days of the development, we managed to implement shaders and animation with shaders (which is an extremely difficult feat). Despite the hit in performance, this allowed the guys in charge of the environment to place lights through the demo map. This small task made the game look way more believable.
Design
- Despite some difficulties with the assets, the scenarios team has been able to import the corridor scenario into Project Atlas with some limitations.
- After some tweaks and scale changes, and despite not having multitexturing, the environment team managed to produce the corridor for the Vertical Slice 2,which actually looks better than expected.
- The gameplay section finally managed to pull off results the combat and general gameplay. It still needs a lot of polishing and refinement, both from a coding and design perspective, but the results were more than enough to pass the Vertical Slice. The tools provided, like communication with scripts and animation events were key to achieve this results.
- Finally, the UI also saw an improvement. We do have ingame dialogue (even though right now the game doesn’t stop, but more important, we have healthbars and stamina bars, as well as a score counter.
Art
- We have another model of alita with hair and textures, even better than the previous one. Also, with the importing pipelines clearer each day, the speed at which we can implement new animations and assets from the assets package we receive. This allowed us to have new hit and death animations for the enemies, and do small tweaks to the others.
