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For my final year project at Teesside University, I wanted to do something a little more focused on game development rather than simple a game prototype/demonstration. As I wanted to demonstrate my project at ExpoTees (TODO - Link here), I wanted to create something with a real world benefit to games studios.

The development of Albackpaca is drawing to a close, while the workload for the programmers is clearly still a prominent part of the work needed to reach a release-ready product. For the last few weeks I have worked mainly on both supporting the team members whose disciplines have not led to much interaction with Unity previously, along a number of other responsibilities - primarily bug-fixing & QA testing, with some additional small work on cleaning up UI elements, additional sound triggers and general polish work listed on the Trello board.

As assets began to make their way into the engine and become ready for use in the game, work on the initial core mechanics gradually came to a close. At this point I began working on the miscellaneous subtle tasks that would be required for the release-ready build of the game - namely sound, a menu with a variety of obvious graphical and audio options and a pause menu with scene travesal and quit functionality. I also continued my work on creating a variety of modular scripts that would serve as modifiers for existing assets to enhance the depth of gameplay.

After looking at some of the subtle features in games like Super Mario 64, Jake (Lead Artist) also noted that many platformer games aimed at a varied age audience will allow control over the camera to the user, but when the camera is not being controlled will have some degree of automatic alignment, so as to not burden the player and allow them to focusing on controlling the character if they wish.

Week four started to see an interactive product come together and so I began work on scripts that would allow designers a modular approach to modifying existing prefabs when designing level sections. This week, I worked on generic scripts that would allow an object to float on any given axis with adjustable speeds and distances. This component was simple to create, so I then built upon the concept by implementing a check which halts the objects movement only when collision with the player occurs in the axis of movement specified, in a MovingPlatform class, as this feature is specific to moving objects that the player will use as surfaces.

In the third week of work I began preparing a set of triggers driven by input that would parameterise the animation state-machine. For example, when moving, the state is set to movement, with a speed based parameter that will be utilised by the animators to blend between a walk and run cycle animation.

Continuing the focus on the most utilised mechanics in any third person platformer, in the second week I began work on the basic character movement script. The intention was to create general directional movement and some subtle other movement features in a BasicCharacterMovement base class, and have the advanced components such as jumping mechanics, sliding mechanics etc. in an AdvancedCharacterMovement script.

Now that I’m back at university for the year, our AGD (Advanced Games Development) module has kicked in to full swing! In this module I’m working with a large team (13 people) on a single product for the final ICA submission. It’s totally open ended and working with designers, artsist, modellers & animators to create a functioning and hopefully professional quality game prototype is an extremely exciting prospect.

So this post originally just had some dumb lorem ipsum because I was trying to figure out if the hosted files on Github Pages get rebuilt or if I have to rebuild the site locally before uploading new changes - looks like it at least adds new posts, which is awesome! Not sure yet if changes to the site’s css or any js will be reflected without a rebuild, but I’m still figuring out the ropes with Jekyll.

I’ve written intro’s to digital projects so many times that I’ve lost count. Review sites, youtube projects, pre-development talent scouting, show introductions. This one is special though.