Production focus for the team was shifted a lot this week, from more of a focus on getting in new content for the train level, to instead focusing on polish on the old refinery level from last semester. This was because last Friday a few of our teammates took the latest build of the game to Massachusetts for the MassDigi Game Challenge. This was a big milestone for us as it would be the first time (at least to my knowledge) that the game would be shown to the public outside of Champlain, so we had to shift into overdrive to get things presentable. In the end we ended up not winning anything, but a lot of people that played the game were very interested in it and, from what it seemed, enjoyed playing, so I think it was still great that other people had fun with it.
The biggest task for me to prepare for the MassDigi build was basically redesigning the current weapons system into one that would be more modular & designer friendly. The player character hadn't been fully functioning for the past few weeks so we were hoping that with this new system implemented it would fix a lot of the problems we were having as well as improve upon what was there. Our lead designer Evan said that he would like to be able to set general variables on the weapons such as rate of fire, how many bullets it will shoot, bullet spread, etc., so I exposed a lot of the variables for them to play around with and create different behaviors.
Changing the spread and bullet count in editor
(Open the imgur link for a better look)
Besides my work on the weapon system, I also took some time to work with Josh on some VFX tech art, namely the effect for our Tesla weapon's electricity effect. The idea for it came from something our professor said in class, that being a tree-like system where a new shock branches off the base one like a leaf node in a binary tree. After combining this with some splines that I create at runtime for a better curve on the shock, the final effect looks something like this:
Shocking, isn't it?
With some better art and a little tweaking I think this baby will be ready to be added into the game, but that will probably be a task for next sprint as this time around I'll be focusing more on tools and more player mobility rather than weapons. -Cory