Task Completed:

Screen Shake and gen unity work (3 hours)

Tutorial work (7 hours)

Balancing (3 hours)

Playtests (2 hours)

Total hours: 15

 

What Went Well?

Got a good amount done this week. The screen shake is in and it can be called from anywhere; so more juice, Huzzah! Beyond that I helped the rest of the team with tutorial design: taking a pass at the text prompts and the general flow of the tutorial. Everything appears to be coming together to finalize the tutorial within a reasonable amount of time. I also started some work on balancing. Less actual decision making and editing, more checking if the GDD values are actually up-to-date, researching spreadsheet game design practices, and preparing a framework for next week. Lastly, we had our playtest session and it was relatively successful.

 

What Could Have Gone Better

I made a poor decision while working on the tutorial. I made the assumption that we would want pop-up windows with drawings of the battlefield to illustrate specific points. However, after a tutorial design meeting, we’re pivoting to more being done on the actual game screen than in new images. Oh well, not too much time was lost. I also wish I could have done more with balancing, but the framework and playtesting data are ready for next week.

 

Upcoming:

Balance

More juice

Tutorial

Task Completed:

Animation (8 hours)

Unity Integration (4 hours)

Total hours: 12

What Went Well?

I spent this week trying to finish up the animations for the 3D menu. The animations look pretty good and I was capable of finishing a large number of them. Integrating them was also not too difficult; although I needed to look into how our original main menu functioned and duplicate its functionality in the new scene. It required a bit of coding; but everything is done and ready to be added to the build. It seems the game made some good progress this week, although I’m afraid we may have not completed everything in time for the beta build.

 

What Could Have Gone Better

Again, bad time commitments on my part for the week. Not entirely my fault; my family came to Philadelphia to visit me and that occupied a good amount of my time. However, the biggest indicator of my poor timing is seen in the beta build. Despite completing the functionality of the menu, it wasn’t finished until the build was already completed and submitted. It was not a feature with significant functionality, so its absence is not too significant a loss for the week, but it’s still unfortunate. I’m also afraid too many members of the team are waiting until the end of the week to work on features of the game. Especially for this week, that meant a lot of issues the night before class.

 

Upcoming:

GDD work

More juice

Tutorial

 

Task Completed:

Animation (6 hours)

Rig changes (3 hours)

Playtest Stuff (2 hours)

Total hours: 11

What Went Well?

After handing the tutorial work to Michael to program, I returned to doing animations for one of the blessing effects and the main menu. While none have been implemented into the game, they are all looking pretty solid and will be implemented soon. The playtesting session went well, but there is still a significant level of polish needed for conveying information to the player. Overall, a good week for the team.

 

What Could Have Gone Better

Personally, I should have completed a lot more this weekend, but outside factors took up a good chunk of my week and I couldn’t finish and implement all the animations like I planned. Although, that isn’t a major concern. Many artists are still struggling to find tasks to do, so spending another week on animations is not terrible. We need to find more tasks for artists over the next half of the term to really push our game to be the best it can be. Additionally, I need to truly engage with some design decisions like should the player actually choose what towers they bring into the game (dominant strategies are already forming), is there an alternate way of spawning units instead of 3 button presses each time, and rebalancing the game to be less turtle-friendly.

 

Upcoming:

GDD work

Finish and implement new anims

More juice

Tutorial

 

Task Completed:

Rigging and Animation (8 hours)

GDD Work (2 hours)

Unity Work (4 hours)

Total hours: 14

 

What Went Well?

This week was a continuation on finishing the unit rigs and getting all the animations finished and implemented into the game. The animations are pretty good considering the limitations of the model and the scale they’ll be displayed at. They look nice in the game view. There may be some adjustment needed for the animation controller, but overall the unit animations seem solid. In addition to that, I added some features to the GDD like loadouts and tooltips. We also had our first playtest and were very successful in getting participants. Overall, a solid week of work.

 

What Could Have Gone Better

We still need more work for some people. While everyone is working hard now, once the current features are completed, I wonder if there will be enough to continue making solid progress for the full team. Honestly, this isn’t the worst issue we could be facing. Normally teams have too much work to finish and not enough time to do it; but I want to make TPO the best it can be and making sure everyone can work on it for the 10 weeks of development will definitely help.

 

Upcoming:

GDD Work

Environment Assets

Juice

Tutorial

Task Completed:

Rigging and Animation (8 hours)

GDD Work (2 hours)

Unity Work (2 hours)

Playtest Questions (2 hours)

Total hours: 14

What Went Well?

This week I focused on trying to finish the unit rigs and begin animating them. So far, the animation and rigs are coming along strong. When they are done, they should be very effective attack animations to sell the overseeing general feel of this game. The team continues to work well together, and meetings are running smoothly. In addition to the unit animations, I spent time updating the GDD and preparing questions for playtesting sessions.

What Could Have Gone Better

The first thing that should have gone better is my personal time management. I should have finished the unit animations this week, but only one is complete. This wasn’t a poor week on my part, but it could have been more successful. The larger concern I’m beginning to have is that the second term of The Two Powerful Ones is less ambitious than the first. While we have a larger team to create assets, the plans for expanding the game still fit within the scope of our original smaller team. I think we will need to expand our planned features in future weeks to create development worthy of this bigger team, especially for all the new artists.

Upcoming:

Finish Unit Animations

GDD Work

Task Completed:

Lamp model and texture (5 hours)

Health bars for towers (2 hours)

Stat Work (1 hours)

Playtests (4 hours)

Total hours: 12

(^model vs reference)

What Went Well?

A lot of this week was spent playtesting and we received some very good feedback. Even though our game still has some rough edges and balance concerns, we were able to get a lot of laughs and a lot of fun from the game which was good to see. Everyone else did a lot of good work, continuing the polish and making our game as strong as possible. I went back and removed the candles to be replaced with a stone lamp and implemented the health bars on towers (that I forgot to do last week). Overall, the team has made good progress and I’m glad to see everything coming together.

 

What Could Have Gone Better

Some failure on my side. This week I again prioritized other classes and couldn’t commit the amount of time I wanted. I wasn’t able to finish and implement the balance changes we received from the playtesting, and I couldn’t do as much environment art as I wanted. In addition, the lamp doesn’t look as strong as the rest of the background. It matched my references, but just looks off. I’ll revisit it next week, but (considering it was already a revisit from the week prior) I don’t want to sink too much time into something that’s potentially good enough.

 

Upcoming:

Unity work (polish, polish, polish)

Additional Asset Development if anything is missing or needs modification

Continue work on GDD

Task Completed:

Model Adjustments (4 hours)

Unit Animations (2 hours)

Unity work (4 hours)

Stat work (1 hours)

Playtesting work (1 hours)

Total hours: 12

What Went Well?

Things went pretty well this week. We made a good number of adjustments from last week and included a number of features that were finished but not yet implemented. For my work, I did a number of unit animations and set up the animators in unity and in the scripts to play when appropriate. I also implemented a few other art assets as well as addressing some bugs regarding assigning unit materials or interfacing with new prefabs. I also did some playtesting and some stat work.

 

What Could Have Gone Better

I wasn’t able to do as much work as I wanted this week. Due to some bugs adjusting the models that added hours of troubleshooting to fix. I didn’t allocate as much time as was needed for other tasks like additional VFX or finishing stat/balance work. I also don’t like that I keep putting stat work off for the end of the week. This week I will attempt to complete that task early on, so we can have people playtest the new balance.

In addition, I need to just make a number of minor improvements to the game that I have noted but never got around to implementing.

Upcoming:

Unity work (balancing work, adding missing/unfinished features, visual/audio feedback)

Additional Asset Development if anything is missing or needs modification

Continue work on GDD