Milestone Blog Update #1

Art Department:

• Characters - Wrote background stories and began planning dialogue and their personalities, updated character artwork

• Enemies- orthographic view drawings for enemy modeling.

• Story - Initial storyboarding, designing overall narrative arc

• Level - Designed level map to organize placement of scripted story events, began conceptualizing environmental art

• UI - New dialogue and menu frames, new character based title logo. Worked on and finalized dialogue and battle option UI. Focused on immersing ideas of parchment paper for each variation. Battle options have icons that define their respective action.

Programming Department:

• Dialogue - Added a customizable dialogue system that uses scriptable objects and is very simple and intuitive to work with. The conversation UI can be triggered by either proximity or interaction.

• AI - Created a gambit system to have prioritized actions. The system will run through a list of condition-action pairs, if a condition is not met, the program moves to the next action in the list. We used scriptable objects to make different attacks paired with another scriptable object that sets the condition requirements. The gambit system will be used on most, if not all, of the enemies and bosses. It is very modular and can be customized quickly and easily.

• Scene and Data Persistence - Built a save system using JSON and static game data. The system was specifically designed to be easily extensible in the case we choose to add additional persistent data or flags. It could also be easily upgraded to enable multiple save files if we want that functionality down the line. Game data will persist through scene transitions and can be accessed from code without needing a Unity object reference.

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Around 2 months since we conceived of Myco: Keeper of the Light, we find ourselves laying down the groundwork upon which we will build this project. With the framework of the story in place, we can begin to fill in the narrative elements that will bring the game to life. With main character and enemy concept art being finalized, we can start moving to the modeling and rigging phases. The UI art design is currently underway, with dialogue boxes being fine tuned for implementation, and menu design continuing in its conceptualization.

On the programming side, a character controller with console controller compatibility has been implemented as well as the initial design for dialogue and character interaction. The combat programming is also underway, with an enemy AI battle system that allows it to utilize condition based actions. A targeting system has also been devised to provide more engaging combat. Scene and data persistence system was implemented to maintain player progress and character growth, two vital elements of a story driven RPG like this one.

Update by: Tom Dettling