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some of the Gun Thumbnails

MoniekDevLog Entry#3

Unfortunately I was sick for one week, so I didn’t get as much done as I wanted this sprint, but I do have some things to write about. So, this time I’ve been working on the gun designs. As you (may) know, the guns in our game are heavily influenced by the music path you choose. So all the designs had to match the style of the music. The plan was to make 10 thumbnails with basic shapes for each gun. Everyone would then give me feedback about what they liked most and what they would change. The feedback was mainly about how the gun should be held, because I didn’t think about that enough. We also established what type of gun they should represent (or be inspired by), so the bass gun would probably look a little like a grenade launcher, the tempo gun more like a SMG gun and the melody gun more like an assault rifle. These were not very strict guidelines, but they helped me to draw the next 10 thumbnails where I used a picture of a grenade launcher in the background to help me with all the shapes. During drawing these I began to understand more about how to make a gun look more heavy or light. This was basically all the work I did this sprint.

neander’s Rythm controller

NeanderDevLog Entry#3

These past two weeks have been a great leap forward in development on the Sonus project. The audio system has been refactored a lot and the skill tree editor is now fully functional and usable. The world is taking shape and the collisions and gun rendering are fixed. I also had enough time left to add jump functionality and start on the the upgrade system.

This sprint we had another meeting with our audio guy and he asked one of his colleagues to help with Sonus. We are really excited to now work with two people who will make the audio for Sonus awesome. This also meant we had another meeting to introduce the new guy to the project and talk about audio. During this meeting we came to the conclusion that the audio system that I had developed was way off and the longer it ran the audio would get more out of sync. So I made it my first priority to fix this, because it is the main feature of our game. After a whole day of debugging and testing I made a new system that is almost spot on. I handle the rhythm of the game from one class and classes that need to listen to the rhythm can register themselves to it. In this rhythm class i made a timer that is based on smoothdeltatime to be framerate independent and I made the timer count in such a way that all the minor errors are not stacking, this way if there is an error it does not throw the complete rhythm out of sync. I also made the audio play with a delay so that the loading time does not make it go out of sync either. After this is working I made the gun shoot in the correct rhythm also. And after that also the vegetation in the level. The last is done by setting certain values on the shared material. The level is pulsing on the base rhythm when the player is not shooting, but when the player is then the level pulses on the rhythm of the gun, this way the player feels in control. The last time I had an skilltree editor that was functional but could not be saved, now it can and it even makes auto backups so that work does not get lost. The data generated by the editor is read in by the audio system and is sorted correctly and then can be played within the game. This way all the audio is not being hardcoded into the game and so we can easily change the whole feel of the game with another skill tree. After these things were implemented I also added a basic jump function so that the player can jump. There was also a problem with the gun sticking through the ground when looking down, this I fixes by rendering the gun with another camera on a separate layer so that it always get drawn last and so it will look like it is not going through the ground or other objects. Thinking about this I almost forgot the smallest yet biggest change I made, smoothing the camera rotation. At first it rotated instantly but now it is rotating over time so that it is dampened, everybody was very excited by this change, and I have to say it feels alot better this way.

The current sprint has been prolonged by a week due to our client not be able to make the demo, so we will go on one week with what we are doing now. After this sprint ends I will be going back to the spawning of the player and enemies and the behaviour of the enemies, but also implementing the animations etc. I am really excited about where we are now and what the next sprint will become.

Jeen made an awesome new model !!

JeenDevLog Entry#3

Pew Pew!

Hey guys, Polypug again. Sonus is slowly becoming a prototype instead of just an empty scene. We’ve been working hard to add some stuff to the game. There’s a new “basic” level. It’s the final level of our game but we are constructing it before the other levels because this will be the “selling point” level. It’s the level that must give a certain wow feeling. I’ve created the basic design of the level and the heart, a feature that’s very important for the game. The heart will be your passive ally in the game. If it’s health is below 0, you will lose the game. The level is filled with new vegetation that was created to give some more mood/feeling to the level. Everything is dipped in some pretty cool shaders and smooth lighting is applied. The game is finally getting a visual boost. A well needed visual boost. There’s also a new gun in production. This version of the gun will be slicker and will include pistons and other mechanics triggered by the upgrades you choose. Every option of the skill tree has its own mechanics that will pop out or in. The hardest part of making this gun was the fact that all the “upgrade” parts need to fit inside the gun mesh. Normally your mesh is just empty from the inside and you don’t have to think about the inside for the model to work. It was a tough cookie to bake, but it smells delicious now that it is finished.

screenshot of our enemy

Neander’s skill tree editor

DaniëlDevBlog Entry#2

Hey guys

This week we've been making some progress on the art department in Sonus!

I have spent my time working on one of the enemies that will be featured in this game. It will be one of the basic units that will try to swarm around you and beat you down mercilessly and feed on your life essence.

My main focus this week was building the rig(the skeleton) for it and get it all working properly so that the transition to animating goes easy.

Hoping that I could finish it in a short time I found out that it underestimated the job, so I spent some extra time ironing out the details of the rig and its controls. Now I'm able to move my 'soctoid' in anyway I please.

Once I was done rigging I started animating right away, and I currently have 4 unpolished animations waiting for feedback. For the moment this Enemy is able to move forward, left, right and attack you in a way that hopefully makes you want to stay away from it. I'll upload all these animations on a later date once they're a bit more polished!

I also drew out the skilltree that you can navigate through as a player when upgrading your gun. Unfortunately people don't fancy my choice of color and font! But atleast it gets the point across and it's nice to have things set.

Lastly a followup from last week, I made a list of questions future wanna-be playtesters can answer to get them selected in our playtests and help improve our game. Our first playtest that we had went pretty well and I think we've got some usefull info from that.

That's all for this time people, make sure you follow us for more updates on Sonus!

xoxo Daniël

NeanderDevLog Entry#2

Hello again. Two weeks ago I worked on the basics of shooting and life loss and the basic enemy. These past two weeks I went back to the audio system and refactored it to work better with the system we came up during a conversation with our audio guy. I ditched the IEnumerator for handeling the timing and wrote my own system, this because they could not be paused and resumed when needed. With the new system these functions are working as intended and the audio can be paused and resumed and still be in the correct rhythm. Before I made this to work I refactored some parts of the framework, this because there where some hickups in ending the game session and the overall pausing of the game. I also made a test with implementing GA(Game analytics) into the project, so we can track events in the game for making tweaking decisions.

I found that the gun needed some audio because there was no real connection between the audio playing and the shooting, so I added a shoot sound effect. From now on we will be working toward a more intertwined connection between the audio, the world and the player. In about four weeks we are aiming to having a kind of flow feeling in the game that we can itterate on. For the next two weeks we will work towards this goal by creating a whole level and a new gun. Programming wise this wil mean somne tweaking and making excisting functions work and feel better but also implementing what the others have worked on. I also started on an editor for creating the skill tree and the upgrades their respective audio and setting changes. During development I will be expanding this editor and make it more user friendly so the audio designer and the gameplay designer can make changes without coding.

JeenDevLong Entry#2

Hey guys, I've been busy again. Sonus is becomming more solid as we speak. The basic mechanics are almost working as we want them to. We have started the level designing process and I did a study about level design to aid me in this process

In this study I've been focussing on: * What does the player needs to do? * What does the player needs to experience? * What is the theme of the level / world? * Elevation (horizontal / vertical contrast) * Different start shapes * Drawing the paths * Player guidance

I have used the study to create 4 levels for Sonus. Level 1 being small and easy, level 4 large and though.

But no matter how cool the level is, it's nothing without some enemies, the good thing is..... I made one I've been making the first enemy model for our game, It is being animated as we speak. I’m very excited to see the result Very curious how the enemy will look in the game.in the game.

More news in a week or 2!

render test of our basic enemy

ThomasDevlLog Entry#2

Two major happenings in the past two weeks first we had our mid term and it was my responsibility to present our concept and progress to two teachers who then judged our performance, voiced their opinion and criticised our project (this in the form of a grade). We passed :) with praise on our professionalism in both presentation and planning. The second major thing to happen was our first playtest. we tested the camera and player controls this is a small part of the game of course but still, the playtest provided us with valuable data that we can now implement in the next sprint. And the playtest wasn’t just for player controls it was also to test our playtest pipeline, how do we go about playtesting ? what methods do we use to get our data ? what kind of people do we use ? Al those things.

another smaller task that I started was the GUI HUD (Graphic User Interface Heads Up Display), just playing around with various shapes and colors

one of the GUI tests

MoniekDevLog Entry#2

The past couple of weeks I’ve been working on the feel of our first test level. Jeen made our level in Maya and I painted on top of it with the colours me and Thomas picked out a week ago.

I also started with a few thumbnails of the vegetation to put in the environment. I looked a lot at different kinds of coral and sea weeds, but also at hardware from computers such as motherboards. I really liked all the straight lines you can see on a motherboard and I wanted to use those as branches for the tree-like plants. Everyone else liked it as well, so we decided to proceed with that idea. I also used a grid-like pattern for the roots of the tree, because I wanted the trees to be connected somehow, to make it seem as they could communicate with each other. The roots made the level seem a lot more alive as well.

I also had a few other ideas for vegetation, but I didn’t have enough time to work them all out and to put them in the level, but that’s something for next time.

JeenDevBlog Entry#1

Hey guys I’m making a post every 2 weeks about my work at the MultiBeast office. I’ve been working on some research and design parts of the project, we were blasting the prototype art to fast that we needed to take a step back and focus more on the design. Especially because the design wasn’t tight enough. There were a lot of loose ends that needed to be tied down. I also tried out the new Unity 5 and I really like the new lighting, it’s a lot beter than the previous version but It’s still a bit buggy though, but I trust the Unity folks enough to say it’s probably going to get fixed within some weeks.

Another thing I did was planning a huge brainstorm session to tight down the design, It lasted from around 10:30 till 15:00 making this particular brainstorm exhausting but it was definitely necessary.

Have I told about my love for making pipelines. I already made a pipeline for the 3d work in our project, and now I’ve also made a pipeline for playtesting. Playtesting is an important piece of our project and it needs to go smooth.

Last but not least, I’ve made some documents needed for school. It’s not impressive nor fun to make but it’s needed and somebody needs to do it, and this time it was me.

#blog #Jeen

DaniëlDevBlog Entry#1

My name is Daniel and I'm part of the Multibeast team. I'll be doing the 3D Animating for our upcoming Sonus project! And i'll be posting about it every two weeks.

However before we can start going into production work we need to have our design to be solid enough. My role was finding good ways to playtest and set some ground rules that will help us find the perfect playtesters. This includes determining what will be tested in each two weekly prototype and setting it up right for you guys who want to try it out. So you'll be hearing more from me in the future when we're recruiting people who want to test our project!

It took me several iterations to get things right and I'm sure there will be some kinks that still need to be ironed out, but I'm confident enough that we've got a solid base to start with.

Now that we've got our design mapped out and a good pipeline for our playtesting we'll be able to start the production work. I'm pumped up to finally work my magic on this and I'll make sure my hype will show in the characters.

I've also been taking extra classes to improve my rigging and animating abilities so that my work as an animator will be easier. This means that I'll be able to improve my art and I hope you're as excited as me for the updates! Or in any case end up being as excited ;).

#blog #art

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