This is The Week!

It's finally our time to shine.

Since last week, I had to make a lot of little changes. I ended up saving out the character customization screen's assets out in such a way that ended up being a nightmare for Alex. After he was being visibly frustrated, I told him I would just save them out more conveniently. He was super happy about that. It saved him a lot of work and stress. Which makes me super happy too!

Furthermore, there was an ongoing discussion about the new spell GUI (on the bottom right of the player screen). Since we reversed the GUI to put the element on the right side of the screen instead of the left, the primary spells -- which previously matched the Q key to switch and Left Click to cast -- were on the right, creating a disconnect between Q and Left Click. After a lot of conversation between everybody about how much sense that does or doesn't make, I finally jumped in and just said I would just switch it and save out all of the GUI elements again so the GUI and the buttons line up once again.

I know I've said this before, but saving out assets takes a really long time. Especially if there's a lot of them, and a lot of different combinations of them. Saving these out again took about 45 minutes, I think, but it was worth it and had to be done. Now the primary spells are on the bottom (left) and the secondaries are on the top (right).

As for textures: the ice team finally has a rock wall!

The totems are finally done!

And we have a new ice brick wall!

There's a pause screen element, ohmigod.

I also made a desktop icon so we didn't have to see the default Unity icon when we wanted to play Mageball...

It doesn't actually work on the desktop, but whatever. Unity is fickle.

Also, I don't know if I ever even showed this finished screen. The statistics screen will display when the player hits Tab. So they can see their teammates, their team's score, how many goals everyone has scored, and everyone's ball time (amount of time they've had possession).

Now that the final build is done... I can say that we didn't get everything we wanted to in the game. There are still some things that could use polish. There are some things that are just default Unity things because we didn't have time to replace them.

BUT...

We are all super proud of what we've done. We all love Mageball. We didn't only work on this game because we had to, but because we genuinely enjoyed it and really liked working on it. So much love and work went into this game that we can't worry about the little things that didn't get done. In the end, we created something impressive, fun, and pretty.

I am proud to show this game on Friday. Absolutely. Knowing a few little polish features didn't get in will never take that away from me.

... Oh wow we're presenting this on Friday. Commence nervousness. I will be sure to post about it when the time comes.

Beta

So beta is due this week, which means the game has to be DONE aside from touchups.

Unfortunately, just because assets got to me super late, I was unable to texture everything before the due date. However, after these few textures I'm DONE (besides the touch-ups). I can't even wrap my head around that.

Before I get to anything I did, lemme just say Holy crap. Chris was doing touchups on the Drago Mines this week. And by touchups, I mean he almost completely redesigned it and now it looks freaking amazing. With all the assets in, it really looks like the mining facility we imagined. Everything looks like it's in its place. Even the crystals look good! I wasn't expecting such a dramatic change, but Chris did an incredible job.

Anyway, this week, I worked on the character customization screen a week before the final build is due (lolz). The system was already in place, I just had to create the assets before we could actually test it. I also had to re-save all of the different character textures out because we decided not to have the custom logo system after all. It just turned out that certain logos looked better with certain jersey patterns, so I just went through and saved out the jerseys with the logos I thought fit the best.

Here is a lineup of all of our pretty mages. :)

Then I textured as much as I possibly could with the time I had. Most of it got done before beta was due, but the untextured assets stuck out with their Unity-default-white ugliness. They were an eyesore in the otherwise pretty scene that was the new Drago Mines.

What's next is just texturing the remaining few assets, saving out the character customization assets, and going back and doing touchups wherever needed. This weekend our team is just going to go to the lab and stay there for the entire Sunday and then Alex is going to call it done (unless we need to do a few tiny things which is inevitable).

Oh, I almost forgot... I did a poster!

This poster is going to be what's on display at the Senior Show, and also... on Champlain's campus in the game lab for a long time. People are going to see my poster for years and years! :') 

I am very proud of how it came out. It went through about a hundred iterations. If you look on our Facebook group in our picture album, you can see way too many thumbnails of this.

Next week, the game is due on Wednesday. I mean the final build. I mean the build that's going to be on display at the Senior Show. It hasn't hit me that this is happening yet. Even with touching up my resume, getting my website near complete, getting my business cards printed, and demo reel done, I'm almost blissfully unaware that this is happening.

The concept of being the one on stage presenting this year is so unreal. People ask me a lot how it feels that I'm almost done and I'm like What? So at least I'm not nervous for the Senior Show just yet, but it also kind of makes me nervous that I'm not nervous.

Go Go Go

So much to do! How is there only a week and a half left? Time apparently moves faster when you're making games or something.

We are SCRAMBLING to get this done. Chris got his whitebox for the fire level complete, which was taking a while just because of how much work and design he had to put into it. (Oh, I'm not even sure if I ever mentioned that he was redesigning it to be a bit less narrow and wind-y.)

Sibyl and Kyle were missing again on our Sunday meeting because they were still getting back from the conference, so it was pretty hectic just being able to talk about what needs to get done and who needs to get it done.

Sibyl and I went into Chris's level and looked at where we could place assets. Originally, we were just going to have her do a phoenix statue to represent the fire team. There wasn't really a good place to put it in the fire level. Chris had the paths designed in a specific way, and clogging any space with a statue would have messed up the level design. Sibyl suggested that her time would be better spent on clutter assets. But then we had to discuss what the "clutter" would actually be.

Chris had been telling me the fire level should be a mining facility for months. And I kept saying No! I felt like there was just too much pressure on giving it a "theme." Like, why did we need a theme? It's a sport. The theme is sport. The field is a sports field. Just LET IT BE. But then Matt named the level "Drago Mines" and I overlooked the connection.

When Sibyl, Kyle, and I started talking about clutter I finally caved (haha get it because mines are caves) and decided to go along with the mine theme. It would make sense. If we did it right, the assets wouldn't get in the way of the level design. I wanted to go for a more abandoned mining facility, because it just didn't make sense to me why they would use an in-progress mine for a sports field... but I guess since this a magic sport, all rules are out the window anyway?

I ended up giving Sibyl a lot of wood assets to block off "passageways" into other mining areas (so players can't actually get there). These would also act as supports or frames for the cave, and mine cart rails. She also did a minecart asset. Kyle was finishing up his column with the mage in the middle, which ended up looking pretty awesome. He was also tasked with a hanging brazier for another light source and decoration. He had to finish his totems for the Energy Totem spell, too.





So here is what Sibyl came up with for this week (untextured)

 

And here is what Kyle did (also untextured):

It's funny when you accidentally completely forget about assets when you have t push them to the side for more important assets. And then you're like OH CRAP and have to rush to get it done when it very well could have been done weeks ago if you had the time.

I had to give Rob, one of our level designers, assets too. We had so many assets to get done that it was spilling over to the designers now. But he was more than happy to do them, and he actually did a great job!

Here are the assets textured.

Chris also had me do some tileable rock textures. I'll admit: I had no freaking clue how I was going to do this. I had done tileable cobblestone textures before. Tileable brick, tileable wood. But how do you even start with a tileable rock texture? What does cave rock even look like? Oh god what am I gonna do?

Internet to the rescue. Tileable rock, luckily, is a WIDELY discussed topic on game art forums, because it's an unspoken rule that every game dev has to make a cave at some point. Sort-of-unluckily, hand-painted cave rock textures are slightly less popular. There are a good few forums posts, though, that were endless help. I took a lot of inspiration from everyday game artists (like me), which drove me even more to make good textures. 

These took me a good amount of hours to do, each. I really got this hand-painted feel with these, maybe even moreso than I would have liked. It's a bit more cartoony than the ice level textures are, but I think when they are applied to the meshes they will look like they make more sense.

I have no idea how it got to be so late in the year already... We still have a lot to do, but at the same time we're winding down and that feels incredibly weird.