Art Department:
Over on the art side here, Christian has gotten some VFX animations ready to bring in and add to our battle scene. He has been working largely with particle effects and shaders to make them stand out this past milestone and we’re excited to see these put to work with our combat.
Art lead Cris here! I’ve been working on getting our enemies modeled and rigged for this milestone. Our jester frog enemy has been rigged with UV layout ready for future texturing. Part of my modeling process is to have the whole model rigged for animation and UVs layed out for texture processes before moving onto the next one. This will keep things moving smoothly later on in our production pipeline. As well, this enemy has an animation we intend to loop in the battle scene as it fights our heroes. I’ve also spent a majority of this milestone working on our mushroom enemy. The foe is all modeled and partially rigged for animation. I’ve been trying to turn out assets fast so we have enough time to troubleshoot here and there. We’re still having struggles with implementing animations for all characters so far in Unity, but we’re making good progress past gray boxing for character assets so far. For level design within this build we created a base for the town Herzstadt, the main setting of our world Lumenwald. This consisted of creating a perimeter of trees that function as our boxed in area that the player can explore. These evergreen models replace and advance our progress by adding in finished models instead of gray boxing for this step. This model is also already fully textured with material variants we can use, so that will give us time to start focusing on other assets earlier on in development. The background of trees also gave us a good way to create a sky box within our battle scene to start. Instead of having to paint a separate background of the forest for our sky box, we were able to render images of the trees to use that match the overworld.
Art Department update by: Cris Derrow
Programming Department:
We have connected the dialog system to the various camera controllers. This took a lot of modifications to the dialog system and the camera scripts to ensure that all necessary information was passed when needed. Also, there is a camera controller that follows the Myco from a top down view that is easily adjustable. When entering a conversation the camera will move in closer to the characters that are talking. Checks for objects that may interfere with the camera’s view ensure that the player will be able to see both Myco and the NPC. This is currently implemented, but there is a bug where the camera moves instantly rather than slowly over a period of time. Additionally, there is a script that will move the camera to a view behind Myco and reveal the sight that Myco is looking at. This is intended to give the player a perspective of the world and tie in to major story elements. For example, we will reveal the Light Towers when Myco first comes up to one. This is plagued by the same issue of instantly moving in and is currently being worked on.
All abilities for the player’s party are implemented with stats as scriptable objects. The abilities have capabilities to target multiple, target allies, hold a particle effect, have modifiers that will scale with the player’s party member’s stats, and include up to two rider effects.
The enemy AI is fully built with easy to customize gambits. These gambits will be a list of prioritized lists of actions and conditions. These actions and conditions are one of the focuses we have over the next week.
The battle system has the main bones. The battle system is another main focus to make sure we are passing all of the right information into a battle and allow the player to target enemies or allies correctly. Once this is implemented building different battles and setting up scripted fights will be easily customizable.
Other minor work includes an audio manager to easily add new sounds and call them from other scripts. Scene management using a generated enum from the build settings is being used to switch between scenes. This will be used in conjunction with the Game Data Manager that stores many different values. These two will allow us to move between scenes and store return locations, current stats, what battle is loading and more.
Programming Department update by: Nicholas Silva