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 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!

Salvage Youth - Week 8 Progress Report

I missed putting up a report last week, since we were focused heavily on preparing presentations for our milestone, but I'm excited about sharing all the progress we've gotten done over the last two weeks because we've gotten a ton of work done on the game.

First of all, we've made a huge step - instead of having art assets for our game, we've actually got art assets in our game. This has been a gigantic milestone for us, and is starting to make it feel like a real game rather then just a demo of the Unity Engine. The Art Team is excited, seeing their art actually in-game, and the designers are having a great time working with the assets to make levels for testing that are much more reflective of real gameplay. It's hard to overstate how critical this stage has been for all of us.

The art itself has been chugging along wonderfully - adding Dan to the team has sped up the process greatly, as he's taking over doing all the high-res sculpts of the prop objects.

We've been doing a lot of planning for the beginnings of our UI stuff, starting with the Main Menu. We've got a neat idea we're hoping to get in-game soon that should tie in well with our backstory and help explain a lot about the world in an elegant fashion. Beau's concept work for it has been gorgeous, as always.

He's been cranking out great concept work for other props and world objects, as well.

We're getting more world props built and pushed through the pipeline as well. Alexi is a modelling machine, he's constantly getting props built and ready for texture and sculpt. Unstoppable.

Zach's got Dustin's concept art nailed down and has already started modelling him.

Randy's got the first rig test complete, but we were given a bunch of information on rigging for Unity by a former classmate, Micah Zahm, that pointed out a few issues we need to address, so we're going back and revising the rig to ensure we won't have any problems getting the character in engine.

I spent some time last week working on building particle systems and getting the designers familiar with the tools. At the moment we currently have a "starburst" particle effect that creates a UI reward element for any time the player does something correctly, solves a stage of the puzzle or gets a collectible. It's already helped with some of our playtesting, giving important feedback to the player as to the context and consequence of their actions.

This week, however, I spent a lot of time researching - I came across an incredible suite of tools called Substance Designer by Allegorithmic that allows us to create modular, dynamic textures. This lets us make "dirty" versions of all of the props we already have in-game and scale between the dirty and clean versions in real-time in engine, as well as creating a ton of modifiable dynamic tiling textures using set parameters - in other words, it saves us a ton of time in our art pipeline and adds variability to our world that we wouldn't have otherwise without devoting an absolute ton of programming time we just can't budget for. Awesome stuff.

We've already gotten successful tests in-engine in controlling these "dirt" passes, allowing them to scale in real time, so we can have Jenny fix an object and reflect her effort on the model by cleaning it up over time. Really, really neat. The Substance Designer toolset is incredibly powerful, and I'm just now starting to get in and wrap my head around it, but I'm excited to spend some time with it and get the results of the work in-engine.

We've really been moving these last couple of weeks, making up for lost time from a few weeks ago when it seemed like everyone was out sick. We were a little behind for this current milestone, but we put together a very solid plan on how to get back on pace for the upcoming milestone in a couple of weeks, and we're already racing to get everything back on schedule.