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 - Four weeks and a world away

We've got another big milestone coming up in a few weeks, wrapping things up for the semester, and we've been listing out everything we need to get done before the deadline. Getting it all listed together, seeing it all in one place, it's intimidating. Lots of work, not a lot of time.

But then I went back and looked at an old build.

For reference, this is a screenshot from the most recent build we're testing with, created 11/17/2011.

This is a screenshot from a build a month previous, dated 10/18/2011

Seriously. Less then four weeks.

I love my team.

Salvage Youth - Week 10 Progress Report

Another productive week with a lot of exciting progress, even with the myriad distractions that presented themselves this week.

First up, we got the car model finished and unwrapped. It is now being sculpted in Zbrush by Dan, and we're excited to get it in-engine.

We made a handful of smaller props to help fill out the trash in the environment, too.

Alexi also made a set of platforms we can attach to rooftops and piles of junk to help build out the paths the kids will take through the environment.

Additionally we have the base models we're using for our main menu completed and ready for sculpting and textures.

The see-saw and mattress are also ready for texture.

As well as the first draft of the small car model.

And the picket fence.

If you hadn't noticed, Alexi is an absolute beast when it comes to producing models.

I made a texture set for the see-saw this week.

Beau has been cranking through concept art as well as churning out great game concept layout work.

The designers have shifted focus, now that we've got a lot of core functionality in-game, to laying out fun to play platforming puzzles and then providing them to Beau to make them make sense for our game world. 

The game layout itself is getting to be a lot of fun - still a lot of placeholder art and objects in, but it's coming along great, and the data we're getting from our weekly testing has been incredibly valuable. 

Zach got ill this week and wasn't able to get through everything he wanted to, but he still did some wonderful work getting the wrench finished up and working on designs for Stu, our third kid.

He's already underway on modelling him so we can get a rough version of him in-game and get rid of the last of the placeholder robot guys. We're all really excited to see him in-game.

Finally, and most exciting for me, Randy finished the character rig and got animation import working for the game.

I've been spending the rest of my time working on animating Jenny and getting her ready for in-game. It's been a lot of testing and working with the designers early-on to get the speed and physicality down, but I should have a lot of fun stuff to share soon.

We set ourselves some new goals this week and are looking at making some really exciting new art and gameplay over the next month or so, and with any luck we're hoping to have the game ready for early public testing by mid-January.