Misty

This week will be the last for the Isocity project.

I have just been tying up some loose ends (fixing minor bugs, cleaning up files and documentation, etc.)

Here's a sneak peek of the new lighting and shaders done by my teammates 👀

This week was spent finalizing some features and touching up miscellaneous stuff.

1. Increased character nametag font size to make them more obvious

2. Shifted the time slider up because the touch detection at the bottom of the screen is pretty bad

3. Formatted the city clock

4. Character AI + walk animation

5. Finalized the SMB minigame

6. PMT minigame

The PMT minigame was inspired by the Scrum framework and Jira—a project tracking software. This is a sprint backlog where users must drag and drop tasks from "IN PROGRESS" into "DONE".

This week I felt extra productive and got a lot done.

Starting off with a piece of good news... I finally completed character creation after a million years. I shall now proudly present this video:

The color wheel and particles were taken from the Unity Asset Store. The character creation panel was created using some UI elements and a secondary camera with layer magic (thanks YouTube). The character spawning logic works by picking a random point within two corners and spawning the character at that point in the sky. The character then glides down and has a cool particle revolving around it.

You must be wondering (or not) "Where are all the networking stuff that were in the previous videos?" Well, it turns out I was overthinking the solution and networking was not even needed in our context, so I deleted them all.

I also made some changes to the wall UI. As compared to the previous versions, the left and right panels were removed to accommodate the character creation panel.

Lastly, I had to recreate the UI masks for the information cards as there was a change in the design.

New information card design:

Filled buttons:

This week was mostly spent refining the SMB minigame. For starters, I changed the minigame canvas to world space mode so that it can be placed inside the SMB building. I also replaced the placeholder images with proper ones and added more slots to accomodate more images to make the minigame more difficult and interesting. Lastly, I kind of fixed a bug where the win condition wasn't detected correctly.

This week I added more logic and a completion message to the SMB carousel minigame.

I also integrated the wall UI into the city scene and made some changes to it:

• Added visual feedback to buttons

• Added 4 weather buttons to control the weather

• Added a time slider to control the day/night cycle

This week I updated the old module info cards with the new design and revamped the UI card system to support multiple decks and pages.

Old design:

New design:

I also developed the base mechanics (drag & drop) of the SMB carousel minigame.

For networking, I decided to scrap PlayFab and the use of databases as I had trouble getting the list of created characters from the database. After doing some research, I went with MLAPI - Unity's built-in networking solution.

As this was my first time doing networking, I had to sit through many tutorials before finding one that suits the nature of our project.

I did some experimentation and got most of it to work.

There are 2 issues though:

• The user has to click the create button twice before their character spawns in the city.

• The user's customization does not apply on their character.

I will try to fix the above-mentioned issues during my 2-week break, which starts today and ends on the 27th. As a side note, I will not be posting updates until then.

As promised, this week is back to character creation.

I replaced the placeholder model with a cool animated robot and revamped the system for users to customize the color of their character's visor and each individual eye.

I have also integrated the weather system into the city. The camera is in perspective mode for now because orthographic does not display the weather particles for some reason, but I will try to look for a fix.

Good news for this week. Our team managed to recover from most of last week's setbacks and are on our way to completing this sprint.

I completed both the manual and dynamic weather for our city. We have 4 types of weather: clear, drizzle, rain and thunderstorm.

For manual weather, our application will most likely have buttons for users to manually control the city's weather unless our supervisor decides otherwise (to only allow administrative control.)

For dynamic weather, our application retrieves weather data from OpenWeatherMap's API and runs the relevant functions.

This week was a huge disappointment. The whole team was drowning in assignments from other modules and we also had to take over Amphibi Studio's social media for a week for our CA. This meant creating daily posts of decent quality to educate our followers, planning captions, hashtags, post times, and most importantly, mini activities to engage our followers.

As you can already guess, nothing was done for our capstone project. However, we will not let this affect us as setbacks are a part of life. We will continue to move forward and put in more time to finish our unfinished tasks.

Added building and UI interaction behavior which displays a pop-up when tapped. When the user taps on an interactable building, a pop-up information card will be displayed. It can also be closed too. The cool animations were made by Zen and the cool information card by Joo Siang.

Due to technical limitations, the character creation web application was converted to a Unity application. This prototype looks even better now though.

We also switched our database service from Firebase to PlayFab because PlayFab supports our application better and it's also free to a certain extent.

Developed the character creation web application with Firebase integration.

So how does it work? The user:

Scans a QR code that takes them to the character creation website

Enters a display name of their choice

Selects the preferred head, body, badge and shoes for their character

Their character data is sent to the database as a JSON object

The Unity application retrieves the data from the database and spawns the character in the city

Brainstorming session for @np-yonin's brand identity.

Yonin is a Japanese phrase that stands for "4 people". Using the samurai helmet as inspiration, the 2 distinct letters are "Y" and "N", making up Yonin.

A rough design that I came up with:

After thorough discussion, our team finally came up with a logo. There are 4 faces representing each of us.