Week 5 ~ 02/03/20 – 08/03/20

Week 4 ended with me being unwell and persisted at the start of week 5. With having had slow progress this far I decided to knuckle down while at home in week 5 and get as much work done as I could. 

I started by making some adjustments to the sprite sheet from Female to Male in order for us to work from it more easily. Then I discussed with Adam about whether it would be okay just to use left and right sprite sheets for NPC’s to decrease the workload a bit. Having confirmed that that would be okay I had completed these 3 sprite sheets by the end of the first day: 

On the second day I created some more sprite sheets: 

And Adam gave me some feedback on how the sprite movement looks when animated in Unity in the form of this GIF:

He also expressed an issue with the sprites holding objects and the discussion about single level vs. multiple levels cropped up again and I was told that Nick had started working on multiple levels even though I believed we had come to an agreement that it should be only a single level. I made one final push to express how adamantly I believed we should be doing a single level because of the workload that doing multiple would put on the group. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a response and so no decision was made.

By day 4 I had created a gif of a DJ sound system with lights to be inserted into the house. The GIF has a PNG associated with it which hopefully Adam will be able to animate so that it sits nicely within the game without the black background.

Later on the evening of Day 4 we had a conference call to discuss more about the layout of the house and more about levels vs a single level. I posted a lot of reference images for the style of the walls and perspective and we discussed what we liked and didn’t like about each. Nick didn’t join the conference call and I struggled to get in touch with him all day to further discuss the final design. Eventually, I was able to get in contact with him and he joined the call in the evening so I discussed with him the decisions that had been made; we finally came to the decision to go ahead with a single house; and about the possibility that I could help him out with the perspective by providing him with blank assets to design on top of as he sees fit if he’s struggling with it, he said that he would appreciate the help.

On Day 5 I worked on providing Nick with the art assets. I sat on discord with Adam, Dom, and Sophie for a lot of the day and produced the following layout outlines: 

The highlighted colours were put on while discussing what pieces the house would need to be faded into in order to have walls that can raise and lower as the PC moves around them to provide extra vision. After confirming the pieces with Adam I started to draw each image out:

We also discussed the possibility of having covers for the rooms while they’re locked or undiscovered so I made covers for each room as well:

I tried to ask Nick a number of questions throughout the day but was finding it difficult to get responses from him so I ended up just making the decisions myself and then letting him know that I was sending the assets and he said he would look at them soon.

Finally, I created some basic door animations which I was really proud of:

Day 6:

I think I’m starting to overwork myself too much because I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote a huge spiel of text to the group about what I thought should be done for the introduction/tutorial scene:

No one responded to this unsurprisingly since it was the middle of the night (lol)

I got another response from Nick but it didn’t answer any of my questions and I was beginning to get very frustrated with the lack of contact and transparency as I would’ve been happy to help (as I was trying to do) with any issues he was facing with getting the work done. Especially because we were working to a deadline for showing the project to Stuart that would be the following Monday. This led to me making the decision to start taking my own initiative on what to do and I started thinking across the day about whether to start breaking down the layout further into the pieces that I was waiting for him to break down. 

Day 7: 

I made the decision to just break up the hallway piece of the house as an example of what needed doing before tomorrow as I still hadn’t had a response from Nick about the work and felt like it needed doing and was a job that I knew I could do. So I sent him a detailed explanation of what I was doing in order to break up the assets and a GIF that I made showing how the broken pieces should work together:

I wasn’t sure that Nick had entirely understood what I was asking for and offered to explain in more detail if he would be able to join the conference call at any point during the day as I would be working on various assets for the game all day. Nick then let me know that he was busy during the day but that he would join the conference call we were having in the evening. I started the conference call with Adam, Dom, and Sophie and we started working through adding the hallway pieces into Unity and making sure that they worked properly. We also worked together through some quest log problems and other UI issues, and I worked independently on finishing some more NPC’s:

Eventually, I needed to go to bed and ended up having a message exchange with Nick instead where I explained what needed doing with the layout and sent him the complete PSD documents that I was currently working on for the layout.