The Dreaming Lake - Production blog 4

Hello again everyone here we are with another dev log update this time for what we worked on in the fourth sprint of the project. We’ve come a long way since the start and are right around the halfway point in terms of weeks left on the project. This sprint was a little slower than I personally would have liked so the team will need to recover from that going forward but I think we can easily pull it off. We did still get some really great stuff as always from the team, and I think i’m going to get right into what that all is. 

    Starting out with Mel she being part of our character dup is still hard at work pushing out character designs, storyboarding animations and creating more animation. This time we got the photo memory done and moving nicely as well as a storyboard done for photo memory 2, the rest of her work had been on character designs for the arsonist, drummer, wicca girl, and the witness girl. My self and Beren also decided to use some of her previous work with designs that didn’t get chosen for specific character to be used for generic characters in smaller indistinct memories that aren’t part of a larger line or sequence. 

Mel’s work: 

    The 3D team was busy with some pretty major high detail assets this time around as well, quickly moving things along Patrick as soon as he finished his work on the second photo girl model got right to work on the arsonist character. Me and him had a brief talk with me offering some advice on how to help speed up his process which really helped get the character out as quickly as we did. Meanwhile Brie had been working improving the gnarly trees, making them more inline with the rest she had made and adding more detail to them so they don’t stand out as so different. She also created some smooth rocks for us to use around water so that they feel more natural in the area rather than the lumpy kinda we had previously. Most importantly she finally was able to work on something other than trees and made us a wonderful cabin model that is built using modular parts so that we could rearrange it how we needed and wanted. Lastly Justin was a busy little bee working on another building we have in now for the barn, it’s a highly damaged structure with many holes in it that looks amazing in game with the lights coming through, he also made us a great telescope and even snuck in some detail in the lens of the telescope showing a wonderful rendition of the stars in it. 

Patrick’s work: 

Brie’s work:

Justin’s work: 

    Matthew and Alex have been working diligently on the map for the game, at this point in the game’s life everything is more or less filled in and set so we have started them on replacing assets with finalized ones as we get them in and making general improvements or fixes to each quadrant as they feel is needed. This has largely come in the form of managing the smaller more micro details, shifting things around for memories. Going forward I have specific ways I want them to handle this micromanagement that I look forward to showing next time. 

Level work: 

    Justin and Hunter have made some more improvements to some of the game’s visuals and systems as well. One thing we wanted to do was make it so that the player had to be actively looking at a memory to focus it so Justin implemented a system to have a line of sight check on the player not allowing a memory to be focused if you cannot see the memory it self any wall or facing the wrong direction will prevent the action from working. A camera shake was also added into the failure mechanic for focusing telling the player when they are about to fail at focusing. Huntermeandwhile has made us more shaders for the game for water as well as made some really nice night time sky visuals of a moon and stars. 

Justin’s work : 

Hunter’s work: 

    And as the usual send off just to quickly go over the burndown information this time around I assigned 131 points 67 of those moving into complete, as I said at the start of this log the team had a bit of a slower sprint this time around we are going to need to make up for this in the next sprint but it is not an unrecoverable amount of loss. With our team size the average number of points completed should float somewhere between 72 and 90 points completed so we are only shy of that by a small handful of points. I would ideally prefer to be more around 80 but the way things turn out that isn’t always possible. With that said I will leave you with the burndown chart and can’t wait to report more next time!