Continue to work from previous week, the team has couple of progress on the development of the first level. The first level is almost done and we are ready for the first iteration of playtesting the 3D world of the our game.
The team finished the first draft of the NPC dialogue script and went through couple of iteration with the clients and faculty members. At current stage it is semi-finished and the engineers began to work on the system inside the game so that we could put these dialogues in.
As for the art assets, the artists polished the 3D terrain from previous week and made it more efficient to render. The previous problem with the terrain was the fact that its UV maps were so complicated that it took a long time to render out the scene. By cutting down the UV complexity, the framerate of our game was greatly improved and it formatted how all further art assets should be created.
The engineers were busy with implementing all the features forged by half presentation feedback. The code structure needed to be reworked to meet the latest needs and the network model needed to be reconfigured to have a more stable connection. Now the dedicated server can be hosted on any Windows running machines with arbitrary IP addresses. A lot of other things had to be adjusted as well. For example, the mini map and tactical map were reworked to reflect robots’ positions in real time better. In addition, the game now has a marker system that enables players to mark any locations of interest.
There are other details being fixed at current time. The goal is to have a polished first level to playtest next week so that the team can get another round of iteration with useful feedback.
The team also spent a lot of time crafting the playtest survey for next week as we wanted to have as much information as possible since the clock is ticking. We went through several iterations and made the final decision to set it up as an automatic survey to reach out to more people.
The final progress the team made was to improve on the UI system. The team came up with a brand new UI system with amazing new look and a modified way of interacting with the game. See the demo video for your self.