Working On Prototypes
Our Character Has a New Name!
We gathered a list of plant like names and voted for which ever we felt sounded the best. The name we chose was Vesa. According to Google Translate, Vesa means sprout in Finnish which is fitting, because our Vesa going to have a young playful sentient plant.
Our Progress since our last post
Lucas has worked on a prototype to share his idea for a level. Lucas is working on completing the mechanics for the hand. He will be working on how it grabs objects and slams the ground to hit enemies. We decided on new mechanics for the hand, so he will be focusing a lot on updating our code.
Lucas spent some time trying to figure out how to use animations in Unity. It may be hard to understand the idea without an explanation:
Lucas is hoping that we are still able to use some of the ideas within this video. The basic idea was that the player was supposed to find 4 blocks on the floor, and arrange them in a patter based on what they see ahead. It was supposed to be a simple puzzle, but the team felt that it would be too confusing for the player. We decided to scrap trying to add a puzzle element to the level, it was deemed too confusing.After that part was just supposed to be a platforming section. We instead decided that the entire section will be more focused on platforming. The artists decided that they wanted to make leaves that will flow through a ravine.
Through discussing this prototype, we learned that it can be difficult to make sure that both the artists and the level designers are able to include the ideas that they want to include.
Joel has successfully exported some of his animations. He has also been working on creating game objects in maya. He has been working on lighting as well.
It looks like Noah's animations for Vesa are coming around. Noah has been working on environments. He will be working with Lucas to add puzzles to our game. He has been working on lighting as well.
Seems like Jeff is working on a way to display the player's health. He also may have been working more on player controls. Jeff has started working on adding Noah's player animations to the game.
Shayne made some leaves for the prototype. He also started working on objects that we can use our grappling mechanics on. He has also been working on environments.
Leaves
Objects for grappling mechanics and platforms
Moving Forward
The possibility of changing our game to strictly a performer has come up. Some of our members have not had the time, or have been unable to come up with good puzzle ideas. With the changes in our hand mechanics, some of our old puzzle ideas may need to be scrapped. We have noticed that puzzles are not a that easy to come up with, but we feel that what has potential to make our game special is that we were going to have puzzles where it was like the player was controlling two characters. So, after the new mechanics are finalized, we will try to quickly add in puzzles to our game.