The Final Stretch

As we move into the end of the semester we've passed some important milestones, with some final polish and paperwork remaining.

Within the scope of the project was always the desire to create an interactive story with an atmosphere to boot. With this in mind we set out to create as many of the assets ourselves as possible, to ensure it would stay consistent throughout.As we've closed in on the project's end-date we realized the amount of work that'd be required to see that vision through was staggering, so we resorted to sampling models from various artists through the websites opengameart.org and blendswap.com.

Thankfully the resources provided there were not only of good quality, but mostly consistent and game-ready to boot, requiring only minor alterations to fit in better.

With the visual fidelity kicked into high gear we also started seeing significant performance drops when certain situations and combinations of objects arose. The hunt for performance increase was on!

Stripping assets of their general usability and only leaving the attributes we needed saved us some performance and smoothed things over slightly. Necessity is the mother of invention, in this case she also birthed curiosity for some of the aspects of rendering a scene on screen that's handled and nicely tucked under the hood in Unity, out of sight and out of mind, at least until it's optimization time. As we scoured the net for information about Unity's culling and algorithms for calculating light we quickly realized several mistakes, some of which were very basic and easily corrected, on our part.Armed with a better understanding we tackled the problems caused by prior mistakes, and made sure our final changes would follow stricter standards.

With the deadline looming it's looking pretty good on a general level, but as with all things we're noticing prior mistakes and omissions (such as a varied set of sound effects) that we're now frantically working at to improve to an acceptable level, even so, there's only so much one can do with the time allotted.

Closing the Gap

As the deadline draws ever nearer, we've been able to substantially upgrade the visual fidelity of the project.
We recently activated the Unity3D Pro 30-day trial, as the project is due before the trial expires. This gave us the ability to add several impressive post-processing effects to the game, as well as enabling real-time dynamic shadows. 

In other news, the core game mechanics are all but finished, requiring little more than some tweaking before all the pieces are in place.
I've created a global power level for the facility, which will decrease in time, eventually shutting down the entire facility and causing the player to lose the game. All powered objects can be linked either directly to a specified global power level to be the minimum required for them to function, or they can be hooked up to a fuse-controlled power grid, in which all linked objects are controlled by a central fuse box with a specified power requirement. Some of these fuse boxes will be broken initially, requiring the player to fix them in order to access specific areas or devices.

Joachim also finished the parts of the interface that displays emails and messages from a hacked device, all of which are parsed from XML. 
All that remains now is to populate the level itself, and puke out a bunch more assets.

-luxus

First Playtest

Running a small play-test on a makeshift level has given us our first batch of feedback, though not representative of the end-product we've been able to test our control schemes and basic navigation.

Seeing how players pick up on certain things and draw their own conclusions on the limited amount of data provided has shown us what seems to feel intrinsic for the player, and what requires further explanation/visualization.

Up until now we have the sweeper robot and the pushing robot implemented. The control system and their models are now being reworked based on player feedback.

The feedback we got in regards to theme was mostly positive, so we'll be staying the course!

Introduction to Intros

After creating a pretty basic script for moving through scenes/levels in Unity the work began revolving around creating the main menu scene itself. Consisting of a single flower illuminated by a flickering light it carries a somber tone, and gives some idea of the themes to come within the game. The intro also features it's own musical theme, somewhat different from the one found inside the game.

Below is an early version imported into Unity featuring buttons and the basic setup (placeholder "Fire"-buttons for added effect!)

Work around the introduction now revolves around giving it some actual visuals, some of the work is complete and is more easily seen directly through Blender. Some of the features we require to get the full effect without creating a patchwork of work-arounds is only available in the Pro version of Unity, which we will be getting shortly to implement various things like lighting/shadows.

Below is the same early version with a bit more work in in-Blender, somewhat more representative of the final version.

An Update! - New Robots!

We had a few more discussions on what we wanted the final product to look like, and the Third-Person perspective was culled in one of our not-so-recent ones in favor of a first-person perspective.
This made the level look a lot bigger, and added to the overall creepiness of the atmosphere.

Among the discussions were also one concerning the different types of robots we wanted in the game.
While we initially planned on having five or six different types, we settled on three for now. One sweeper-type, swift and tiny, for exploration. One mover-type, large and bulky, for moving heavy stuff around. And finally one fixer-type, medium sized with some sort of blowtorch or wrench-arm, for fixing broken wiring and fuses.

I've put together a little webplayer demo showcasing our new robot types, and the functionality for switching between them and the surveillance camera.
You can try it out here.

-luxus

Skeletal Structure

At this point we've created some of the game's most basic assets and controllers. 

With the floor plan transferred and modeled for Unity by LuxusElg, we have started producing objects and scripts we can put into the game world for testing.

There's naturally a few speed-bumps along the way, but at this point we've settled on a workflow and pace that allows us to produce a steady stream of content and having this updated pretty much real-time. 

Unity is very kind when it comes to importing/exporting assets and will happily grab anything in it's designated Assets folder, meaning we can produce basic prototypes of any in-game entity and continue working on it even as it's moving about in the game world.

As we move forward we'll continue populating the world with objects before refining existing one's.

First Gameplay Prototype

Here's what I've been working on for the past few Unity sessions: link

It's a prototype of the third person controller we intend to use in the final product.
It needs a lot of work still, but it's something.

Among other things, the controller in its completed state will feature a more vehicle-like handling, due to the nature of the robots, where you will not be able to strafe and such.
The camera will also collide with other geometry, and it should adjust its position if something is occluding the character.

Other things to note is that the view will initially be from the POV of one of the surveillance cameras, and you will be able to swap between them using either a hotkey or some form of HUD. From the surveillance camera POV, you will be able to target a robot to 'take control' of it, and the view will change to a third-person perspective and give you WASD-movement.
Currently, the cameras just track to the position of my placeholder robot. Which is awesome. And creepy. (Seriously, I tried it from a first-person perspective, and having all the cameras tracking your every move is really freaking creepy.)

-luxuselg