Week 14 - Deadline
I started this week with the intention of finishing the miniatures sculpts for the cutscenes, however this is not possible as my teammate won't be able to finish the textiles in time. Instead we have decided to revert back to digitally drawn cutscenes and finish the miniatures for the arcade event.
I have also filed for a two week extension which is necessary due to the shuffling around of our roles. This will allow us more time to polish our game and make sure it is fully playable.
On the Monday I made sure both of the cutscenes and the end scene were linked into the project as well as fixing up the UI ahead of Tuesdays playtesting (build 1.9).
We didn't manage to get too much feedback but there's plenty of content we can work with. Our narrative experience is very different to a lot of the games our peers are making and we don't often have time for people to sit down an engage with our experience. The generic feedback is that it seemed good for a short narrative experience but definitely needs cleaning up. Our lecturer said that making sure our game is consistent will massively improve its quality, such as making sure the font in the same throughout the whole game, making sure the UI layout is consistent so the player always knows who is talking etc.
Since receiving this feedback I have reduced the cutscenes down (cutscenes 1 is now 1minute and 40 seconds, cutscene 2 is just over 3 minutes) to reduce the artwork needed and keep the player's attention more effectively.
Despite the lighting being inconsistent for unknown reasons, I have fixed it so that everything can be seen and there are no dark corners (my more recent playtesters said they couldn't notice the lighting difference between scenes anyway). I have added in more 3D models to make it more of a circus of curiosities as oppose to just a circus, including plushie rabbits, oversized books, bunting across the walls and ceiling and a giant bear. Yet to be added are rugs (I tried this using the hair particle system in Blender but this wont transfer to Unity's particle system so I'll have to find another way), oversized ribbons for the walls and potentially oversized masks and anything else we can think of. All of these oversized objects will fill out the environment and enhance the dollshouse atmosphere. I would like to change up the textures next week, so I will texture all of the new assets and change some of the textures on the crates for example to be more colourful. Its a partly fantastical setting despite the 1900's context and currently most of the assets are a brown wooden colour - this doesn't work with our essential experience idea in that we need the player to want to look around and explore.
Furthermore this week I made a blockout armature and animated this using Mixamo. I then put this into Unity which works great in the scene, however I'm yet to work out how to swap the scripts from our current character sprites to the 3D animated models. This will be the last task on my list but an incredibly important one nonetheless.
I had another meeting with our lecturer this week regarding our UI scaling issue. During playtesting in the studio we found that the buttons during the interactive narrative scenes appear incredibly small on a 4K screen. Despite changing the canvas scaler size and testing UI scaling fitters, this is a known Unity problem and cannot be fixed. Our only other option is to make the game in a WebGL format for Itch.io so that the game can be played in browser. In principal this is simple to do, however when I tried to do this I had numerous issues. When I finally managed to get the game to run in browser a lot of the images weren't popping up, the opening cutscene was skipped completely and then the game encountered a runtime error during the first interactive narrative scene causing it to stop working all together. I am keeping the downloadable zip file format for now, because that at least has most of the game accessible.
