Alonso's Development Blog

     This week I was given a chance to continue my narrative work and was tasked with outlining scripts for the audio logs within the Mines. I've never done scriptwriting before so this likely is not really industry standard. But I tried to write something out to try and convey the plotline a bit more thoroughly.    Initially I was going to make the audio logs a bit more disjointed where some happened at the start of the expedition, so in the middle, and some towards the end. This didn't really work out how I wanted though since I realized the narrative was going to turn out extremely messy and chaotic. So I decided to make the audio logs a little bit more linear. However if time permits I do want to make audio or written logs (perhaps 'corrupted' ones that need to be uncorrupted) that you can find that convey what happened later on to the miners that can be found in the upper layers of the mine.    As for the actual scripts I wrote, it wasn't too hard...

     This week my main contribution to the project was creating a concept for the wizard's screenflow. I mainly wanted to convey what we likely would have needed for the wizard to function properly. This mainly just included making outlines for our various menus and such.    I also tried to convey some of the requirements we would need for the editor portion of the wizard. This mainly just includes various click-based interactions and such. I tried to make sure the interactions would feasibly make sense within the confines of our coding expertise but I am worried about the complexity of it.    I also did want to give the option to save and load ideas, but I recently realized that might not fully be possible. Especially due to the fact that saving files for loading later is a bit complex. Hopefully we get a chance to add it in but I'm not sure. Honestly my two big concerns are the lack of people actively doing design work and the potential programming v...

     This week I admittedly didn't do anything. At the start of the week nobody could really make it to the meeting. And over the course of the week mostly everyone was out for one reason or another. And I still hadn't gotten feedback on my lore ideas so I couldn't move forward in that area.    I do have ideas for how I want to move forward with the story though. If we can find a way to add in interactable props I could have the player press something near a prop to read it's lore. Like interactable tablets or holo-journals and things. Just so we don't have to make voice logs for everything.    The other major thing I want to solidify later is the 'main characters' of the miners side of things. I did come up with a good chunk of them, but I want to round the group out some more. Though I am worried that we're now rather late in development so we might not have enough time to do everything we want to.

      This week I felt like it was finally time for my specialties to shine! At the start of the week we all pitched our narrative concepts to each other. For the most part everyone's concepts were really, really good! There were a lot of similar elements between the six that were submitted, but I didn't mind too much since that just means we have the same vision for the game. Though the different elements allowed for some interesting challenges when it came to coming up with a narrative.    Later on in the week, once I recovered from being sick, I spent a good half a day working on compiling the ideas together to string together lore, worldbuilding, and narrative. For the most part this is meant to be a rough draft for the others to look for, and will likely go through some iterations as the project continues, but for the most part I'm happy with how it's looking so far. I took some inspiration from an analog horror I watched once ( Greylock ). I also tried to ...

       This week was mostly just miscellaneous work for me. One of the first tasks of the week for me was to add a tileset to the Forest level. This mainly just involved putting tiles all around the level that adhered to the level's layout. The most annoying aspect of this job is yet again the diagonal platforms as I had to put those in an independent tileset that was rotated slightly. For the most part however, it was fine to complete.    Later on in the week I helped Anisha with some playtesting and debugging. The build was admittedly, for all intents and purposes, completely unplayable. The bear would always spin around and the sprite would keep changing scale. I managed to solve the bear spinning problem however since we never locked the player character's Z state.    Towards the end of the week I got relatively sick which put me behind on a few major classes. I sort of had to give on doing more for this class because my other three classes to...

     This week was pretty fine! I was tasked with running through our current build of the game in order to pinpoint various bugs or problems that we have accrued during the development of the game these past few weeks. And considering the fact that these past few weeks we haven't really been doing bug collection I thought it might be important to do it now before things get too out of hand.    I'm actually rather glad I did this because I did find a lot of problems in our game. Most of them are just an assortment of issues that are either minor visual glitches or random coding errors that could probably be solved with simple adjustments to the code. There's a few other issues like NullObjectReferences and whatnot, but overall I don't think a lot of these should be too bad.    I also did add some remarks gameplay-wise. Apparently there is a bit of an issue where the encounter rooms have no ores, and the main path has no enemies. I feel like this adds a...

   This week was mainly a continuation of my level design work. Now that we have a series of graphics set up by the artists, I was tasked with setting up the level with those graphics and tilesets. A task that was pretty fun to do as I set up everything across the level.    Handling the actual ground assets were pretty easy, though I do worry that I made the ground a bit too deep. The bigger problems were the diagonal platform assets, though I just settled on making different tilemaps for those in the inspector and angling those tilemaps by various degrees to represent the diagonal platform. Hopefully that isn't too bad though since this is my first time actively working with tilemaps.    The only things that make the level incomplete is a lack of player character, collectibles, and enemies. Though I have a feeling those will be added later on once they're fully sprited and coded in. So that's not too much of an issue for me right now. I'm just glad to have...

   This week was a little more slow moving than usual, at least for me. My primary task was working on actually implementing the randomized ore generation into the first level. I would've done the second level but we established that one was going to be overhauled a little bit so we just did stuff for the first level. Doing the actual ore implementation stuff was kind of easy since all I had to do was find the coordinates of the previous ore pockets and copy those into the newly placed ore nodes.     I did have to edit the ore randomization code a little bit though. I found out that randomizing the rotation wasn't working well and was causing ores to generate too far into the wall at times. So I just dropped it and now ores just generate the same orientation all the time. I think the biggest concern was just making them random anyway. Now everything is at the whim of RNG.    Later on in the week I tried to create some general concepts for the narrative...

     This week was mainly just me doing more level design work. At the start of it I was tasked with tweaking my first level to make it more proper and easily mappable. This mainly just meant making sure every asset within the level was either a whole number or a half number. My instructor said that was going to be tedious but honestly it was rather nice going through it and doing that. It's not like I had anything better to do anything so it gave my brain something to look at for a good hour.     Later on in the week I did work on the second level. We needed to do a mountain level so I decided to make that my focus. It was also mentioned that all levels need to have the same size in width and height so I tried to design the level with that in mind. It wasn't too hard to do but it was definitely a bit of work in order to get looking right.     I am a little worried about what the other designers of our teams are up to. Towards the second phas...