Another week, another gaming convention. Seriously, why are these back to back? Trying to kill us. Luckily, though, PAX is an end of the week event and we were able to complete everything we had scheduled. Unluckily, next week is our break before our final push, and time always seems to be pressing on us. Anyways, onto this weeks work and accomplishments.
Starting off the week, I got started right off with our design meeting. We solidified our boss' progression through his various stages, which we have set up to closely mimic what player's initially experienced in the first boss stage: 3 stages, the first two focusing on an individual power of the boss, based off the books they have faced in the ward, with the 3rd stage combining them into a wombo-combo. When the bosses have both abilities, it is representative of a culmination of all that the players have learned and mastered over the past levels, with players having to think work fast to beat the boss.
This was followed by implementing some of our new sound effects. My primary goal for this was to replace many of the old placeholder sounds so that we could see how the finished sound effects would work in game. Luckily for us, they worked very well and we were immediately able to see the product of our labor. Sound effects can always be tricky until they are in game. What might sound good out of context, could very easily sound awful in context, so testing them is usually first priority. Ideally, I would have liked to have had them in sooner, but it has had to take a back seat as we have been implementing gameplay features so quickly. However, as the design team begins to finish up with our content, and our focus turns to polish, UI, and sounds, it will be getting much more of my time.
Speaking of UI, myself and Maher, one of the designers on our team, spent 3 hours developing various 3D mockups of our 3D UI elements. These are pieces that will work better in 3D due to our camera system and the way that we have our screen space laid out. Simply making 2D objects and billboarding them will work for some things, but others parts must be 3D. In fact, I'm actually struggling to think of any purely 2D assets we have for our UI other then our menu system, which will still be 3D-esque in it's design. The mockups turned out well and should speed up the process of our UI artist getting final versions in game. I'm hopeful to knock out UI soon, so we can remove it from our plate.
Next week during break, I'll be implementing sound effects in to our game and hope to have the vast majority of them done.