Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Salvage Youth - Week 11 Progress Report

Another busy week with a lot to show, but I can tell the team is starting to feel the weight of a long semester. It'll be nice to have the Thanksgiving holiday to let everyone depressurize a bit and get some rest.

We've started keeping a more detailed changelog as the designers get in and start making tweaks to gameplay and getting more and more mechanics into the game. Current changelog for this week, as of Monday:


Art imported to engine

  • Stu Rev1 Model
  • Jenny Run animation rev1
  • House wooden Planks
  • Picket Fence
  • Billboard houses
  • See-Saw final


Game changes

  • Pulley puzzle set up for Jenny/Dustin
  • Start of splitting up of kids within the level
  • Added House Billboards to the level BG
  • Got Jenny Animation working in engine
  • Got Stu model in engine
  • Bug fixes to Stu Pickup/Throw
  • Stu can Jump!
  • Dustin has a gui element (temp art!)
  • Dustin's sprint has a trail
  • Main Menu camera Tweens edited
  • Main menu button fixes, no more invert
  • Jumping controls smoothed out
  • Atmospheric fog
  • Screen Space Ambient Occlusion
  • Field of View changes per character
  • Camera fixes so all 3 kids are visible
  • Outline shaders edited
  • See saw puzzle edits
  • Messaging system
Even beyond this, we've made a number of other changes - we've got basic screenspace GUI elements in place, such as a rudimentary word balloon.




You'll also notice we've got a first pass at fog to create atmosphere as objects recede into the background. We should be getting a skybox and background planes for the distant city in within the next week or so, as well as low-poly houses instead of the single-plane billboard-style houses.



We're also going to be adding in a lot more art into the screen to start filling out the world. We're in the process of planning our modular trash pile system and just got our first pass at models for one of our trees - we should have older decaying versions of this tree and a couple other types within the next week or so.




Beau finished up concept work for the bus, the third and likely final vehicle model we're working on for this push of assets.


He's also put in a bunch of time getting the concepts tied down for our Buzzbot model, which we should have modeled soon.




Meanwhile, Zach finished up the base model for Stu, and we've got him in the game!


This is just a flood-fill texture, we'll have a much more detailed texture pass on him in the next couple of weeks as Stu and Dustin get put through Zbrush for high-poly sculpts and final textures.

Alexi, as usual, has been modeling like crazy.




I got some more texture work done on top of working on the animation for the kids.






We've got our First Playable presentation coming up in just a couple of weeks and we've scheduled out the tasks needed to get us ready for this milestone. We're already in pretty good shape, things are really moving along quickly, but we have a left to go. We're pushing hard to polish gameplay up and start getting sound into the game, and there are a lot of art assets we're going to need to get the world really tied together, but we're all on track and excited to get this next big push complete.

See you next week!