Sprint 6 Recap

 Sprint 6, we are nearing the end of our development run, and I'm happy to say we are still on track. That being said we had to scrap a lot of planned features, and even completed work. The hexagonal maze that I spent a lot of time making the modular components for was unfortunately entirely scrapped. Meaning that our final build will only include 2 furnished levels, plus a tutorial one.

This sprint was a time we spent together calculating what things needed to be dropped in order to meet our deadline, which why I'm speaking so heavily regarding the topic. Scrapped things aside, lets go over what I actually did during this sprint.

 I completed the maze keeper at last. If you have been following previous posts, you'll that this has been something I have been working on on/off for multiple sprints. The first thing I did this sprint was actually UV it. The reason the model was not originally UVed when it was "done" was because their were still some fine tuning that I needed to do. This only took 15 minutes or so, and I was able to quickly start the UV process after that.

The arms and legs are both mirrored on the UV, giving far more texture density to be used on other objects. The map is 2k, which is actually the same sized used on all the textures, the modular walls included. Despite that, I was able to create a far higher level of detail relative to the other models in our game. As of right now, this is also the only asset in our game that I have textured. The primary reason was that it became evident over development that our textures have not been particularly high quality, so I was told by the lead to handle the texture for the Mazekeeper as it was not something we could afford to done subpar.

The texturing was quite fun, as its something I have been doing for personal projects every single day, for the past 2 months, so I greatly enjoyed trying to liven up this low poly and cartoon like character as much as I could.

After that, I worked on rigging him:

Besides making him look more fluid and natural, I also changed the skeleton to make his arms far further apart; this will become far more evident once I start showing the animations. For the most part I was very happy with the rig. The model is very low poly, so some level of stretching was to be expected; especially as elbows and a few other joined were never clearly indicated in the model itself.

This is the walking animation, and it will be the primary state you will see the maze keeper in. It was difficult to create one that looked both aggressive and menacing, but also floaty an d cartoon like. I was pretty happy with what I got in the end though. The only other animation that was requested from me was that for an attack.

I went through a few ideas, but eventually landed on this lower swipe type motion. I had to remind myself that the player is a chicken, and thus is significantly shorter then the mazekeeper. So a standard punch would not make much sense, as it would go way above the mazekeepers head. Despite these two being the only animations that were requested of me, I did play around and create one for when the maze keeper gets stunned.

The work regarding the maze keeper took up the majority of my time. The texturing was very detailed, and included over 50 masks. Animation on the other hand, took far longer. I had 0 experience regarding true animation before this. I had worked with interpolation as well as stop motion, but nothing like this before. The only other major model I created this sprint was the chicken feet.

This would be mirrored in Unity, and independently animated by someone in there. This animation is far easier as its simply using a script to arch the object by 45 degrees in a fluid motion every other second.

I worked on fixing one of my previous models as well. For whatever reason, the scaling was incorrect on the breakable wall. It was about 30% larger then it should of been, and thus was no longer particularly modular.

Here you can see the breakable wall in dark grey, alongside a normal modular wall, showing that the scaling issue has been resolved.

Lastly I worked on a new particle. These are the dust particles, and would appear directly under the player, as well as the Mazekeeper. It's suppose indicate the dust being disturbed from walking/running. In this gif the dust is static, but it would normally be on a moving object where you would more clearly be able to see the physics and drag of the particles at work:

This wraps up the majority of my work this sprint. We are entering Thanksgiving break, and because of that will only have a single week in Sprint 7. This is far tighter then the previous projects I have worked on, but we have conducted the proper damage control to the point where this project will be completed on time, meeting all the requirements, and being in a playable state. That being said a lot of assets will be missing. Two of our group members have been rather inconsistent have caused some major issues in a multitude of areas. Being that we are a team of 6, it still meant we had 4 competent people to handle all the work. The issue with that being, me and the other 3 people had to do work that was not in our skillset. Such as me doing all the animating. Regardless, we are doing acceptable for the cards we are given, and though I will not be proud of this game, I will be very happy with how the working members and I were able to keep it a float.