Alpha release approaches

This past week I have worked on creating dialogue content for the game between the nurses and the player, as well as looking up more art to bring into the game, and generally testing the game. Close to doing the short gameplay capture as alpha release is near.

I intend on getting more done during this coming week wherever needed, whether helping others with their tasks or working on my own smaller tasks, etc. Looking forward to the transition ahead.

The Game is Almost Ready for the Alpha Release

Over the past week my work consisted of redesigning the game's map. Instead of attempting to design every element of the map from scratch (which would have been more work than necessary), I got a package off of the Unity Asset Store that came with a bunch of prefabs. This made building the map much easier.

In order to design the map layout, however, I first had to figure out how multiple aspects of the game would play out, for instance:

• What characters will the player face when trying to escape the hospital? Where will these characters be located and how will they prevent the player from escaping? Where can the player move to on the map to avoid having to interact with these characters?
• What kind of map would be the most interesting? Obviously a map with one straight hallway would not interest the player. Being that the game takes place in a hospital, I made sure to put multiple rooms and even designed rooms that will eventually resemble operating theaters. (These rooms are empty right now but they will get filled with 3D models to better reflect a hospital later on in the development process.) 
• Where should the keys be located? I realized that I didn't want to put the keys out in the open because that would make it too easy for the player to find them, but at the same time I didn't want to put the keys in places that would be near impossible to find, as this would just frustrate the player.
• Given that the gameplay video for the alpha release has to be between 30- 60 seconds in length, I made sure to make the map big enough so that the time it took to beat the game was at least 60 seconds.

Going forward, we are almost done with the alpha release at the time of this writing. We just need to add a few more things such as dialogue and a timer. We will do this tomorrow. 

Dialogue Distress

As with most things in software development, if something seems like it is easy to implement, then it probably is not. Turns out that getting your players to speak with others in the game is one of those things.

A few crude attempts at figuring out how our player can interact with the nurses in the hospital fell flat, since I completely underestimated how complex dialogue is. As much as I hate having to rely on things others have made for use in Unity games, I swallowed my pride and purchased a dialogue system from the Asset store for a frugal $5.

One of the reasons why I do not like relying on pre-made assets is because its usually a pain to implement a general asset into your unique special snowflake of a game, and who wants to read Read Me's and installation guides? Ain't nobody go time for that.

Anyway, I got it to work after a day, but am now faced with annoying, smaller problems. How do I stop the first-person camera and movement when the player is in a conversation? How do I allow the player the choice of killing the nurse, instead of simply talking to her? How do I make the dialogue display prettier? I shall figure this all out tonight.

Words of the Week: Frustration and Anticipation

I wasn't able to pursue the addition of sound effects in our game last week, as originally planned. This was due to our group as a whole deciding it'd be best to push that task further ahead—not until the entire level/game map was ready—in order to avoid task redundancy (i.e. minimize the number of changes that needed to be made by a single person). In spite of this, I still encountered a great deal of task redundancy, unfortunately.

Our Unity project is enormous in size and pushing it to Git has not been feasible since the size of the file surpassed the maximum space allocated to our repository quite early on in the development of our game. A large portion of our project involves game objects and assets rather than scripts. Currently, our method of making changes to the project between group members involves one group member working on the project at one time. Once they are done making their changes, they upload the project file to Dropbox or Google Drive and share the link with the rest of the team. This procedure can lead to issues if multiple team members decide to work on the project simultaneously, leading to multiple versions of the project with both missing key functionality or features. This method has also lead to multiple versions of the project existing on our computers and it's quite possible for one team member to accidentally upload or send a download link to an older version of the project. As a result of this, I've had to make the same changes to our game multiple times, which has been frustrating. 

One task I performed this week was the reintroduction of sounds to signify the pick up of keys or opening of doors in-game. I was able to synch sound with key pick up without difficulty but synching sound with door opening has been slightly challenging. In this iteration of the game, doors that are opened now rotate in position, rather than disappear entirely, as was the case in our game prototype. Attempting to introduce code for sound to the door opening script interferes with the functioning of the door, however. During testing, I discovered doors will either not open at all, or their original position will be off.  For the time being, I've decided to leave out sound for door opening, although I definitely intend to revisit this issue before Tuesday of next week as I believe the sound will introduce more realism to the game. 

Another key task I took on this week was the use of sound to build a mood and atmosphere within the game. This task certainly involved a level of creativity and I'll admit I had a hell lot of fun carrying this out. I decided to start the game off with soothing music that would lull the player into a false sense of calm, perhaps making them even think the game was of a different genre entirely (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WrongGenreSavvy ;) ). As the player proceeds onward, the game track transitions to something more suspenseful, yet still subtle. The sound continues to evolve as the player makes progress, and travels further along the map. Additionally, certain rooms or wards within the hospital have their own unique track. To achieve this, I employed the use of multiple audio sources referencing various tracks I was able to find in the Unity asset store. One point of concern was ensuring certain audio sources located farther away did not drown out audio sources nearby. This was challenging, and I discovered that fiddling around with the Priority levels and Volume rolloff of audio sources mitigated this effect. Although sound is now in place throughout the game, I'm still not entirely satisfied with the effects in place and would like to further hone and test as we continue development.    

I also attempted to reintroduce cursor effects (when the cursor changes based on the player's action) to the game this week but at this point in development this has been difficult to test due to there not yet being staff or patients for the player to attack. I do think a cursor change when the player opens a door is now unnecessary because doors are now opened via the 'F' key rather than clicking.   

At this point, I'd also like to add more models to the game to further enhance the look and feel of the hospital setting. These models may include furniture, wall hangings, signs, paintings, bathroom fixtures, etc. The use of audio reverb zones is also something that intrigues me and I look forward to potentially incorporating them into the game. Moreover, I'm excited to see the work Tanya will be doing to introduce interactive character dialog.

Polishing Up the Game

This week has been pretty hectic, we finally put up a map that we can work with. We also bought some models from the asset store to make our game really pop and look amazing. After Bavneet put the map in our game I've been adding models and making them look SEXY. I made all the objects spin, and added blood stains to the walls to make it creepier. Also now that midterms are out of the way I can work more on this game! I think for the up coming week what I need to learn is animations using unity, I found this really cool spider package on the asset store that comes with a lot of creepy animations -(I got it to work before but now I'm having some trouble with it again so I need to actually "re-learn" it). I thought it would add the aspect of creepy to have little critter crawlers running all over the place. I also learned how to apply textures to random objects. I found a "blood stain" texture in this package called "Medical Clothing Package" so I added blood stains to just about everything like beds and curtains and walls. I think my next goal other than animations is to intensify the aspect of "scary/creepy". :)

Went through some tissues, now ready to tackle the issues

Reading week was an awfully busy one for me, though it seems like it flew by. I had to prepare for my two midterms which are back to back on Monday, wrote a paper, and caught up on readings for several courses, which took up all of my time... I did however put some thought into some issues with the game that we'd discussed the week before, especially regarding the end of the game and some 'bonus' additions. While wanting to keep the game simple and stick to the fundamentals, a balance between extra, unique, and 'special' features to the game and these basics is needed. Beginning this week, I will put in more practical effort into the game itself and help out my group with any endgame and extra ideas, implementations, and so on. I will try to follow the schedule we set up in our write-up and perhaps change/go beyond that, where needed.

Development Process Planned Out

Over the reading week I decided it would be best to plan out the development process for the project and then get group feedback. This was done to ensure that everyone in the group was on the same page in regards to what we would like to see for the next presentation of our game. Also, this will help to avoid "integration hell" as we each will know what phase of the development process we will all be working on. (Each phase of the development process will be done in a sequence that we have agreed on.)

In terms of development, I'm going to be working on building the levels for our game (i.e. the actual level layout).

Mo' money less problems

My reading week did not involve any reading. I was assigned on a contract to make a website for someone, so that took up all my break time. It also took up precious time that I would have otherwise wanted to put towards our game. As excited as I am about this game and my group, Hospital Trance is not paying my bills, so I had to put it on the backburner. Staring Monday, all of my efforts will go towards our game, and I will start by tackling what I think is the most challenging task for our development - figuring out how to implement dialogue.

Combinatorics: Check.

My reading week mostly consisted of catching up missed readings and studying for my upcoming midterms. I can say I definitely acquired a lot of knowledge about combinatorics, since that it the first midterm I will have to face. But I also set some time apart for the fun stuff- working on the game! I found a lot of new models for out game to make it look more neater, and have been trying to implement a new idea of dressing up as a doctor! Hopefully I will be done with that soon :)

You may delay, but time will not

As usual, reading week has been spent attempting to tackle whatever task (read: obstacle) school—and life in general, unfortunately—has thrown at me. Much of this week was spent collaborating with my team members for an entirely different project, and with next week just right around the corner, I’m starting to feel immense stress anticipating how much I need to do within a span of a few days. I plan to ensure all relevant sound effects in our game are placed and near polished by tomorrow, and that the player’s cursor changes appropriately with the player’s actions in-game. Scouring the asset store and the web for more musical pieces to set up the perfect ambience for our game will definitely be more fun than anything else I need to do, however. ;) 

First Post!

Just testing out how this looks :)