Salvage Youth - A New Semester

It's been a long time since I've gotten to put up a progress report, since we took our long break for the holidays. A week after returning, we were hit by a snow storm that shut down production for a week, but we've gotten back into the swing of things and are in crunch mode to meet some very intimidating deadlines over the next few months.

The last post I made was right before our First Playable presentation, in which we showed off all of the content we had in place at the time. We were able to really get the basics of gameplay and demonstrate all of the basic mechanics, as well as show off how our focused art production pipeline was paying off in terms of our tied-down visuals.

Since that time, we've made a lot of changes - the biggest change has been in terms of our team itself. We've lost two full-time members, but we've added four new ones: Jermz Gallardo is coming on as a full-time animator, Steffani Charano is joining us as a 3D artist, Bobby Simpson is our newest Programmer, and Laura Franke has joined us as a 2D animator to focus on our opening cinematic.

All this new help is already paying off a lot - our production process is speeding up and we're able to really focus on polishing the work we've done and getting new work pushed through the pipeline at record speeds.

We've really focused on filling the world up with content - now we have scripts set up to allow us to literally dump garbage all over the place to give us a bit more of a randomized feel, breaking up some of the inevitable pattern-forming that occurs when everything is hand-placed.

We got a lot of other new assets created before the break and added to the first playable demo, also.

We worked hard to get them incorporated into the environment and tied together for our presentation.

We got a working early version of our main menu in.

Our tiling terrain system is already working well for us.

We've also built multiple levels of detail for the houses, giving us the ability to create lots of depth without costing us too much performance.

After our presentation, we took some time to take a break and step away from the project. It was incredibly therapeutic for the team, giving us a chance to relax and come back with fresh heads. The difference was amazing. We had a long, incredibly energetic meeting when we came back where we looked at what was working, what wasn't and how we wanted to finish our game. The result was thrilling - we've redesigned our opening sequence, are revisiting the puzzle mechanics into more condensed and focused fun gameplay and we've got plans for a terrific boss battle that should be a lot of fun. Even better, this new focusing actually reduces scope and gives us a chance to really focus on good gameplay and incredibly polished assets.

During the break, I played around with AfterEffects and learned how to make this game team splash sequence.

Beau took a lot of time over the break to just have fun and concept up a bunch of great ideas.

He even modelled up a great early version of our Incinerator Bot.

He also made these adorable, only slightly creepy cookies.

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Beau finished up the final concept sheets for the BuzzBot so that Zach could begin texturing.

Alexi made a bunch of meshes for our collectibles.

I got the first pass at a walk cycle done for Stu.

Beau concepted up the area for our new tutorial section and game up with some great rocket designs.

Alexi made a first pass at a tiling garbage bag texture, and then took the rocket design and made it a reality. It is almost frightening how fast he is at this stuff.

Zach made a first pass at the textures for the BuzzBot...

...and then took our feedback and went back to finish it, then make two more.

We've gone ahead in-engine and gotten working versions of our tutorial section and our first puzzle in place and will be prepping them for testing early this week. We've got a LOT ahead of us, but with this new, larger team working together stronger then ever, our excitement and confidence are really helping us power through and prepare for our deadlines. We're very excited to get the game in front of people for testing, and expect to do so by the end of our Alpha presentation. Keep an eye out!

Salvage Youth - Week 9 Progress Report

It never ceases to amaze me how quick things happen on this project - every week I have to go back and look at what happened since my last report, and every time I'm amazed that it only happened in a week.

Like what, you ask? Well, we've got a logo now. Makes things all official and stuff.

We've already used it in some branded artwork hanging on the projects boards here at school - great looking stuff Beau put together.

Alexi has been hard at work as always, modelling up a storm. We've got a few more gameplay props being pushed through the pipeline.

We also did a lot of work this week standardizing sizes and shapes for our tiled terrain system - the basic unit is complete, with a rough texture pass done for it. I already tested replacing one of the sidewalk tiles for another shape, the banked sidewalk that allows driveway access, and things worked perfectly.

I actually had time to do some texture work this week, too. I love getting to polypaint, it reminds me a lot of painting miniatures and traditional models, something I almost never get to do any more.

I also spent more time playing with particles, getting the water spraying out of the hydrant looking more realistic. I also got to do a little animation - the hydrant now rumbles and flaps as the water shoots out of it, and when you fix it, the lid floats up and slams itself down on top.

If you look closely, you'll notice another new feature we've got working in the game - real-time shadow-casting. We need to spend time dialing in the lighting, and right now it severely slows down our framerate (we're still averaging around 80fps, though), but that's an optimization issue - every item in our game is casting real-time shadows. In later builds, once we get the layouts more established, any static object (items that don't move around) will get shadows baked in, so that we don't have to render their shadows every frame. It'll save us a TON of computing power.

We've got some other new features working, too - we have patrolling enemies (the robots above, although the art used for them is placeholder art for the time being) with incredibly intuitive tools for setting their waypoints, thanks to Ryan. We also found a great plugin for Unity called iTween, a free system that allows us to animate or constrain objects and characters along splines and bezier curves. This lets us actually move objects along complex curve systems and control speed, direction, all sorts of things, in a perfectly predictable manner. The tool is pretty robust, and it's already found its way into our main menu system and some of our puzzles. It'll also allow us to move the kids between lanes much more naturally as well as make their lanes curve from side to side around objects, rather then the perfectly straight lines they were previously. Good stuff.

Alexi's been working on getting the first car up and ready for texture/sculpting, which is great - this is one of the props with a lot of character we've all been looking forward to seeing come together.

He's also got a great little mattress all finished, ready for texture and sculpt. Meanwhile, Zach's been hard at work getting our fast kid, Dustin, ready for putting in-game.

At this point, Zach is switching gears - instead of getting the zbrush sculpt done, we're going to get the Stu character concepted and put him in some drawings with Jenny and Dustin, making sure that we are thinking about the color schemes and designs of all three kids at once, rather then waiting until the end to do him. Zach has been rock-steady reliable for his contributions since the start, so this change-up shouldn't effect our estimated progress at all.

We're really moving along, getting tons of stuff in-engine and in front of testers, and it's really going great. We are all still excited and motivated about the project, but we all know we still have a long, long way to go. Hopefully we can keep our enthusiasm up through the rest of the year, but with a project this fun, it shouldn't be too much of a challenge.

See you next week!

Wasted Youth - Week 6 Progress Report

It's been another exciting week of progress, with at least as much work on the back-end planning stuff then on all the pretty art that's so fun to post.

First of all, we've got a new artist on the team! Daniel Samuelsson has joined Scrap Metal Games as a support artist, he'll get to start working on high-poly sculpts and texture work on props this week. This helps us fill the last major gap in our pipeline, and just in time, as it frees me up to focus on animation right when we're getting our character rig completed. We're all excited to work with Dan, he's a great 3d artist, go check out his blog.

That's right! Our first iteration of the character rig is nearly ready! We should have a prototype of it tomorrow to start testing, making sure that the system will work in-engine and we can test the last major hurdle of our pipeline, getting character animations in and scripted to be fully functional, right away. As I've been helping some underclassmen with their animation lately as a Projects TA, I've been itching to get a chance to do some more animation, so nobody is more excited about this turn of events then me.

We spent a lot of time this week trying to finalize the most recent drafts of our GDD and TDD, and are getting a very solid roadmap of where we're headed with the project in the process. We got some really valuable feedback from professors on how we can further refine them and where we can put more attention, and we're well on our way to having an exceptionally thoroughly documented project - with a crew ten students working on this game, often in their own time at their own houses, this is a critical component to success, and helps us make sure we're working on the highest priority tasks we can be at all times.

We also wrote up a complete roadmap of our roadmap feature commitments this week, giving us a long, thorough overview of every critical feature of the game we're planning on implementing and when they're expected to be deliverable. It really is great getting to look this far ahead and see how everything is coming together - especially considering we're still right on schedule to meet our current deadlines.

We had a lot of new concept work and art tests done this week - Beau has been pumping out concept art for new props.

He also worked on testing some grass and foliage alphas to put through the "painter" feature in Unity that allows us to lay down broad strokes of plants and other debris on terrain objects. We're planning on using this feature to help scatter random trash and stuff throughout our environment, filling the world way faster then it would be if we had to place each object by hand. He put a bunch of this stuff down in-engine along with some test models just to see how things might look in-game, then dropped in a first-person controller to let us walk around the models and see how things look!

We got some new art assets textured and ready for engine, too.

Zach got Jenny all textured, too. There's a few final touches to make, but she's nearly done! If the eyes and mouth seem a little out of place, that's because they are - they're going to be applied later as an animated sprite texture, allowing us basic facial animation without having to deal with facial rigging, a major time-saving feature.

And last but not least, we may have a new name for the game! Wasted Youth was always a working title for us, as we liked the idea of it but it has some implications we're not particularly pleased with, so without further ado, I present you with our newest name:

Whatta ya think?