Sprint 5 Blog

11/7/21

    It looks like my permanent job for this will be a mixture of modeling, level design, and producing, because every time I think I'm out.... With that said this was another sprint with a mixture of multiple roles interweaving and introducing further materials to pre-existing levels. This was yet another 7 point sprint for me, so lets get into it.

    Starting with modeling once again this sprint involved two new models for the game on my end, caution tape and mice!

    The caution tape was made by starting with a cube and stretching out the dimensions of it. Adding in additional edge loops allowed me to bend the tape and help give it a little bit of extra depth. Initially I had tried to use a plane that I bent around, however it did not translate well into the game as the plane would impossible to see if angled certain ways from the camera as the player navigated the map. Changing it into a thin rectangle with a 0.1 meter depth caused it to be VERY thick tape, but it translated much better into the game. Due to how far out the camera is in comparison to the objects in the game it actually allowed the 0.1 meter depth to look almost paper thin.  

Up front view of the tape

Top down view of the Tape

Moving onto the second model our team knew that while we wanted to have the thieves moving around the building, this caused the player to always tunnel in on what they saw within the cameras and laser sensors. To add a bit more depth to the game and give the player more to track, we decided to add some neutral entities to the game that the player does not catch for points and does not steal anything from the player. Instead it serves as a distraction to keep the player on their toes. The first model we decided to add was a small mouse. This mouse, like the thieves, are only visible when in a cone of vision.
This mouse has a fairly simple design. Between its size, the darkness of the level from our emulated "night", and zoom out on the camera a lack of detail was very easy to get away with. Cutting out the bottom half of a cylinder to create the body, cutting out 3/4 of a sphere for the head, and then using some torus to create the ears, I was able to create a functioning mouse model for our game.

I opted into neglecting legs due to our previous experience with the guard and thief models. After realizing how hard it was to see legs and arms for those significantly larger models, it felt only natural to to not use legs and allow our game to save out on rendering extra, unnecessary polygons. It also makes the mouse significantly easier to animate as it just needs to rotate left and right 20 degrees to create a goofy and cute imitation of movement.

Moving on from models, I wrote a script for our tutorial! Our team struggled heavily when it came to deciding who would be the one instructing the player HOW to play our game. We knew that our initial tutorial was sufficient in getting all the information out, but it frontloaded too much to the player and made it hard for them to remember everything they needed. I made the suggestion that we teach the game over a series of nights with a small amount more hand holding than initially given to the player.

    The problem is that none of our team has great experience with writing dialogue scripts, let alone dialogue meant to address the player directly. I stepped up for my team and took this job in order to give my team the space they needed to complete their work and give myself a little bit more time to figure out exactly how to adjust my levels around a tutorial system.

    While the script is a bit too long to post as screen shots, I have provided a link. In particular I am proud of the name of the man who owns the buildings you will be protecting, one Mr. Tuto Rial. This little pun got a lot of positive feedback from early testers who loved the way of telling the player they are doing a tutorial.

    Moving onto our new levels, BEHOLD!

This top down view matches the previously shown annotated map (some slight changes made to address room sizes not quite lining up correctly). As mentioned previously this will act as the second level for the game (first level after the tutorial) and will be a much more open map for the player. One thing that we had to consider was how the first night would be the absolute hardest no matter what for the player. If the player can get around the first night successfully, their set up is already strong enough to get around all the future nights, making future nights feel pointless.

These views provides a better visualization of the rooms with some perspective to show some of the depth

The tutorial level will be getting even further updates to add in more detail, but you can see the progress of how much better the rooms look with even just a few filing cabinets included. I will be able to make these levels feel even better by giving the rooms more unique properties with our upcoming models that have been completed.

I didn't have any uncompleted work at the end of the sprint and I believe 7 points to be the solid point for me with my current school workload to ensure quality and ensure finished products. I will see you next sprint with likely 7 more points of work to show off!