#putdownthatdrone

Well here we are, just one week left. Pretty scary ain’t it?...... 

To be frank, I have never been at this state before; where things look like they will actually be done before the deadline. Currently, I have been working on trying to fix the suspicion meter fixing the bugs of area 2, finding why the the Guard AI stopped chasing the player, getting the AI to move to Area 2, manipulating rigs to create a static mesh of a pose, adding sound and UI elements.

In the past, problems would have occurred by now that where I had to scrap down the project by now and would have yet done a play test. However, with this team I find ourselves overestimating many tasks and underestimating a couple others. As a result, we have worked hard to get it done. I have mixed feelings towards this project, where I am not really that into it due to it not matching my vision; yet I am proud to have something that might be fully functional for open studio. Overall, the team has been great and the work flow has been better than a few other experiences. The only issues I have had on my side were design disagreements with the team, then again in larger teams this would get worse. 

AI Migration:

I managed to get all the AI to migrate to Area 2, after all the screen have been turned off. The problems I faced where frame rate issues due to the amount of data the AI is processing. Additionally they would run into walls and keep running into them as they slid to the side. 

 However, when trying to find a way to deactivate the AI; I stumbled across this node:

Which allows me to stop all the logic coming from a Behavioural Tree (An AI thing in ue4: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/AI/BehaviorTrees/QuickStart/). 

After that, I used another function that made the AI move to a certain object in game (It’s invisible and at the end of area 1). 

Also, I shrunk the navigational mesh from one big one into multiple small ones. So less data would be processed.

Before:

After: 

Here are videos of the AI migration to Area 2. When recording the first video i was blasting music on my desktop without realising. 

Didn’t intend for this one to have music ;)

Actual Video

Prologue Stills:

 A very time consuming job, most of the other shots will be seen in the game. However, these were the harder ones out of the lot. Where i had to manipulate the rig to a certain pose, save it as a static mesh and place it into the scene and check what else needed to be edited. Rinse and repeat the process, until you get the desired outcome. 

However, I am happy with the outcome; because of the amount of time that went into it. 

Area 2:

I have gotten the guards to spawn and react without dropping the frame rate or performance by a noticeable degree.  

But most importantly of all I have finally (Hopefully???), got the area 2 min-game to work. This was a big challenge to find the logic that would work well, took longer than expected and was not an easy task. Now all I have to do is conduct further tests and fix any remaining bugs. The final expression takes into to account 15 different possible scenarios that the player could trigger. There’s also more that I do not want to go into detail with. 

Video:

Sound and UI:

The deadline for Studio III is approaching a lot faster than I feel like it should be. That’s life in a universe travelling constantly* through a dimension of time, I guess.

I’ve been working on a few areas of All In: A Game of Chance: The voiceovers and the music. Let’s go through them one by one.

Does saying “one by one” still make sense when there’re only two things

The voiceovers

These are pretty much done! They’re all implemented; the only thing that remains to be done, pretty much, is to change the volumes so that they are more equal than they currently are - at the moment, there are a few lines that were originally too quiet that I overcompensated for in editing, and as such are now too loud.

There was also a line that I forgot to record... I managed to splice the words together from existing lines (as there was another line that had only one word changed from it). It’s noticeable if you’re listening out for it, but given that it’s not that easy to notice if you’re not listening out for a mistake, it only emerges under a particular set of circumstances and the player never has to listen to that entire conversation anyway, Nathan Jr and I have chosen to call it done.

There was one major edit that I made to about a third or so of the lines for artistic purposes: I added some reverb to lines that are intended to represent the protagonist’s thoughts. I came across a lot of different ideas as to how reverb can make audio sound like thoughts, but I diverged from most of the ideas I came across: I used a medium delay rather than a large one; I made the reverb louder than the actual line; and I made the reverb deeper than the line, as your own voice sounds deeper inside your head than it does to others. I’m pretty proud of the reverb effect; I ought to upload some audio to show it off. It really gives the idea that this is a voice inside the protagonist’s head.

They’re all implemented into Unity, so now I just have to edit the files themselves to equalise the volumes a bit and we’re set.

The music

I’ve made progress on a bunch of fronts with regards to A Game of Chance’s music.

I have a full tracklist, I think. I’ve come up with titles for the 18 tracks I plan to produce for the game (I know that’s a lot, and I’ll talk about that later).

Here they are, in case you’re interested (and even if you’re not):

All In ~ A Game of Chance

I Raise ~ Where Am I

Reflection ~ What the Hell

Replay ~ gnisrever emit sI

I Raise ~ What’s Going On

Reflection ~ A Pretty Good Handle on Things

Replay ~ niw ot evah I

I Raise ~ How Can I Win

Reflection ~ He’s Bluffing

Calling His Bluff

Reflection ~ A Royal Flush

Replay ~ tsol t'nevah I

I Raise ~ Can I Win

Reflection ~ This is It

Replay ~ Realising the Truth

Calling His Bluff ~ His Real Bluff

All In

A Game of Chance ~ The Ballad of the Player and the Opponent

I went to the Ace Attorney school of “Every song subtitle needs a tilde.”

So far, I’ve written 7 of those tracks (1-2, 4-5, 7, 12, and 15), and that’s just been in the past 3 days, so I’m fairly confident of my ability to finish the remaining 11 in the next 9 days - although that’s not all that needs doing, by any means.

I’m basing all the music on the original score I wrote for All In, like I said I would in my original design document. I don’t have nearly enough time (or skill or patience) to write a couple individual bars for each line of dialogue like I originally planned, but that’s okay by me.

While there are 18 tracks there, you’ll notice that the mostly have the same few titles with different subtitles. That’s because I plan to have them be arrangments of the same tune, with different instrumentations, keys and tempos. And those tunes are, in turn, pretty much just taken from the original score. What, did you want 30 minutes of completely different and original music? By Wednesday week? Nah, fam.

Do people still say fam

That way, I hope I can represent the different phases of gameplay with similar tunes, giving people similar thoughts on the same phases of gameplay but making them incrementally different, expanding on the idea that this is a story told in multiple parts, each of which is itself the ‘same’ story - a story about a story.

Put Down That Drone // Studio III

I’ve been busy working on my project this week, which has been both frustrating and relieving to finally get started on the construction side of things.

Before I could string up all the puzzle pieces I had to drill two holes in the top of each piece. I am very thankful I had the foresight to draw arrows indicating which direction was up on the back of each piece, otherwise this would have been a long and overly complicated process.

While suspending the puzzle pieces, I initially started out with placing them using measurements. This was slow and painful, and only worked for the first few pieces. I also had to be millimeter perfect with my measurements, and it was easier to just take a few steps back to the point where the perspective worked and judge everything by eye, manually adjusting and lining the pieces up.

Even when I just went to guesstimating with arranging the pieces it still took up to twenty minutes to suspend each piece, with cutting two strings and tying it to the puzzle piece, using blue-tack to hold the piece in place, walking over to the right point and then checking if it lined up, going back and adjusting it (repeat this step fifty million times), and then once it was in the right spot tying off the strings at the top and then checking for a final time that it still lined up. (It wouldn’t, adjust it three more times)

Over time I got better and more efficient at suspending puzzle pieces.I got better at guesstimating the initial placement, I found a better, more secure way to blue-tack the pieces up (Initially the heavier pieces would fall, and I’d have to tie them entirely on a guess and then go back and retire it later.) And faster at adjusting the pieces. Which cut the time down to... ten to fifteen minutes per piece. And I had a hundred and five to do.

There were only a couple of points where working when I was convinced that I was going to fail, that it wouldn’t line up properly or that it’d take too long or something. One was when I’d just started, I was working on the hair, which was comprised of many small, fiddly pieces which were difficult to place and had to be super-duper accurate. This was frustrating as hell, and slowly destroyed my enthusiasm for my work as the sculpture just wasn’t coming together. I ended up skipping those pieces, and went back to fix it later. Working on her arms and chest was much easier, and the sculpture actually started working properly. It was kinda cool, and I was half-surprised that something I’d constructed digitally was actually working in real-life as well.

I used over a hundred and fifty meters of fishing-line in the sculpture, but fortunately I had enough. Buying the fishing line was probably the easiest purchase of my project, the shop had exactly what I was looking for, enough of it, it was relatively cheap, and it was also easy to find.

I started work last Saturday, and after about eight hours I’d only done about twenty pieces. I was a little panicked at that point, but I’ve spent almost every day this week in Studio working on it, and I’d mostly finished suspending all the pieces by this Saturday.

I haven’t suspended all the pieces, some of the littler pieces aren’t necessary and would just take up too much time to do. I’ve only got four more pieces to hang up, and then I’m going to glue the strings in place and get rid of all the excess fishing line. 

I want to write little tidbits of information about her on the back of each piece, a part of her personality, to enforce the idea of how a person is many different fragments and facets and not just one thing, but I don’t want the meaning to be shoved into people’s faces. However, most people wouldn’t be looking that closely at the back of the sculpture, so it would be sort of like an Easter-egg thing, and shows how if you want to get to know somebody you have to spend time around them. I have her thoughts projected on the wall behind her, but this extra part to the sculpture would tie things together better I think. I’ll think more on it before making a decision.

One thing that didn’t really become important until people from class started looking at my work was the different heights that everyone is. While everything lines up perfectly at eye-level for me, other, taller people have to duck. I’ll put a mark on the floor indicating where people should stand, but I like that people move around my sculpture, ‘playing’ with it as they try to find the right spot to make everything line up. 

Studio V: Texturing progress update

After a very interesting testing and restarting the template for the Auckland City Central Library I have finished the template. 

The red carpeted area is where the new Makerspace will be located, next to the Esquire Cafe. This is where the kids will be able to let the imaginations loose and redesign the space however they would like. I am unsure how to add in the 3D printer and the computers. I thought about having a separate block to represent these items. I will test this out.  

Update*