What week is it now? Seriously I don't even know. Classes seem to all melt into one another.
Work has been pretty overwhelming. Luckily, both AI and Networking have pushed back expected due dates, so I have been able to catch up.
Anyway, as for Senior Team...
These past few weeks have been very interesting.
We split up our prototype into individual mechanics and iterated on each individually. The main things that we iterated on were controls, camera and health system.
In doing so, we have discovered our purpose for making this game, which makes me very excited.
The controls were a main priority. Both the team and tester feedback support our move towards the flickit controls, using the right and left bumpers to set whether the fighter is in Punch or kick mode, and the using the right stick to attack. Unity's input system, either because of the way is built or because of an inherit delay from the hardware, seems to be sluggish when responding to input. It it subtle but is enough to notice after a while. I am planning to try using the Raw Axis data from the controllers as input We will lose much of unity input benefits, but should gain a good bit of precision for the input data.
[ A week of ignoring this blog post later... ]
This past week was spent learning Strumpy's Shader Editor and working on several iterations of the shader we want to use for some of the comics.
Through a mixture of light manipulation, rim darkening we got the comic look, and manipulating the light ramp texture allows us to perhaps use it for various ages.
I added a screen detail aspect to the shader itself, with uses the screen coordinated of the fragment to use as uvs on a texture.
I used a model of superman, since he was of similar proportions and color scheme, and because I could compare my results with actual superman comics from that age.
In the end though, it seems Rebecca does not want to go with this style. While I think that making each character have a distinct age feel would be much cooler artistically, the reality is that it presents a large number of issues. Firstly is in shader requirements. having multiple styles means very different materials and probably multiple shaders, which can take a lot of time. I had proposed to counter this with tools like SSE, and I think I was moderately successful in creating the Golden Age shader, but by making all of the characters follow a similar art style, we can simplify out modeling pipeline and reduce the number of shaders that we need.
It will also help in terms of animation reuseability. One thing that really concerned me about styling the characters after different ages was the difference in mesh proportions. For instance, Superman's(Golden Age) upper body is massive compared to Spidermans(Silver Age). This could easily create issues where certain animation look good on one, but clip badly on another.
Finally, and most importantly, I think going for the more modern depiction of superheroes("amazing Spiderman") contributes more towards our goal of bringing new people into the genre. Our basis for the superhero route was use the increasingly popular superhero trend in recent years. Most people within our target audience would likely be unfamiliar with the styles of the Golden Age/Dark Age etc from the actual comics, but would be familiar with a more modern style seen in shows like Justice League/Batman/Spiderman etc. Because of this I think the more modern look would serve our purpose well, and probably better than a more classical era specific style for each character.
[And Another Week Gone by without posting (Bad Adam Bad)]
This week I focused on Art Pipeline for animations. We have been planning on using Motion Capture data as the basis of many of our attacks, but there are many steps to this that we need to make sure that we have down before we go into production. I learned a good bit about 3DS Max, and will continue to do so. I went through some tutorials on cleaning up mocap animation, and tried to do some myself with mixed results.Essentially, what I would like to do is use .BIP files, a biped animation file used in max, as the basic animation data. A good bit of motion capture data is found in the BVH format (Biovision Hierarchy), and can easily be converted to BIP in max. BIP file (Biped Animation) are easy to transfer between bipeds, so hopefully this will make our use of them easier.
I plan meeting Josh Buck on Monday with Rebecca, to see if he agrees and if he has any suggestions for our art pipeline. This weekend I will be revamping the controls to be sharper and more concise as well as bringing in more animations and putting them to a character controller. By next week, I hope to be able to show some really cool stuff.
I also included Lumos Analytics into our game, and used it during our testing sessions to watch for attack use as well as how many times players used the blocks. There were some interesting results from our first two play sessions, and we will need to address them in the coming weeks. At the moment it is hard to judge because of how little difference there is to the attacks. I will be adding an idea I had this week, where while performing certain attacks, the character will be "weak" to others (so if im doing a high kick, a low kick will devestate me) to see if this affects the numbers.
Sorry for the delayed post, things are hectic right now, and look to e more hectic next semester.
Peace!
