Our team was able to get off to a really good start for the last sprint which means we are already making huge changes to the gameplay and player experience to mold our new target market.

For this blog post, I am going to be discussing the changes that I personally have made towards the new UI overhaul, the decisions that I have made and what will happen for the rest of the UI.

The first major change was the in game UI which went from a very static display of numbers just showing the ammo count for each player and the level time to a dynamic showcase of the player’s current special ability, their cooldowns and the level name.

The Brown squares on the bottom left and right will show off the current equipped  special ability (which for now is blank while we start creating icons).  The ammo count will shake and grow when players shoot or obtain bullets and the cooldown squares fill up to full when the player has a special ability use available.  The level name (in the upper right hand corner) disappears after a short period of time to give more attention to the level itself. This is just a layout for the final UI that will be developed continuously throughout development but is a huge increase from what we had before.

For the next iteration I hope to further increase the visibility of the icons and placement by possibly placing a blur behind the UI or if I have to a static image that fits into the game world.  I will also be adding a star counter underneath the timer (which is why the timer seems to be higher than it should be). The level name being “-1” is also just a bug with the specific level that is in the screenshot.

The next update I did to the UI this sprint was to our new upgrade screen which will be replacing the progression menu for the player’s opportunity to upgrade their character and play the way they want to. The main goal on this screen is simplicity and even choice for both players.  We chose to go with a system with 3 randomly picked upgrades for the players every time they get 5 more stars.  You can see the general layout for how the final version will look (as it isn’t implemented in the build yet; we still have to finalize the upgrade system itself).

The next iteration, I will finalize the layout for all three upgrades as well as find a new font to pair with the one we have.  The Bauhaus font is very difficult to read when used in paragraphs and so a nice similarly simplistic and childish font will be better for the description fonts.  I will also work on animating the arrows that point under the UI so that the users can know exactly which upgrade they are hovering over.  The last major change for the layout is to add a progression bar to this screen that I will use for the level end UI as well.  The progression bar will be a way for the player to know how close they are to getting a new upgrade.

For next sprint, I will dive more into the specific greenlight challenges that we have tackled, as it will be the sprint before we challenge to pass into the greenlight stage.

This week for Capstone was a leap of improvement for many aspects of player feedback, including adding in new sounds and visual effects, and tweaking many gameplay values.  I also worked closely with Bryce (VFX and UI Artist) to correctly incorporate the UI mockups that he had created.  I was able to put in the final UI direction for the progression menu, level end screen and level map point UI.

While these UI elements will need a bit more tweaking before the final build at the end of next sprint, it is very nice to have them in the engine to connect all the details of the gameplay experience for the player to really feel involved in the game.

Looking forward to next sprint being our final sprint before we have a finalized packaged version of the game, we just need to really finalize some specifics on the game’s balance in regards to the level times.

I am extremely excited to show off this project on November 20th and it’s amazing how much progress we have been able to make.

This sprint, I worked on multiple things for the team, the main one being the over-world system, that I kept iterating on and made sure that it worked with no bugs.  I was able to also prototype new special abilities that we can QA test as well as implement the game.  The final thing that I worked on was finalizing the player’s visual feedback.

The Overworld system had a major focus on the transition phase between the overworld system and also each level.  Last sprint I had the overworld basic systems down but there were tons of bugs in regards to when the player left the level and went back to the overworld.  Overall, the systems works perfectly now with three different levels (and the ability to add more easily) and that’s all that we need for this vertical slice.  However continuing iterating with the transition phase will be necessary to nail down exactly what we want: A visual experience that makes the player feel like their entering this world of toys.

For the special abilities that I prototyped, I continued with the trend of the dashing ability and made two others that give the player the ability to change their play-style with just the change of playing more.  The Shield (Pictured above) allows the player to collect enemy bullets which can give players who aren’t as keen on dodging or maybe waste too many bullets another chance to beat levels.  The Shotgun ability, lets the player shoot three bullets (one in a straight line and two 15 degrees at an offset) so that players who want to spam shots quickly or have a tough time killing closer enemies have a better chance at success.  Each special ability allows for success with different play-styles which is definitely one major aspect of the game.

The last thing that I worked on was the visual feedback of the player which has always been a major focus of my role on the team as a designer.  I added the start of bullet trails after the player shoots a bullet which increases the polish level on the bouncing bullets.  I also altered the camera shakes throughout the game and started prototyping feedback elements for the newly added special effects.  Overall this sprint I was majorly focused on making the player feeling genuinely comfortable with the player experience and satisfied with the difficult gameplay.

For this sprint, our team was able to prototype every major missing system that we want to incorporate for this vertical slice, as well as plan out the majority (if not all) of our tasks for the rest of this production cycle.  The two major prototyping that was done by me personally was creating the Animation Blueprints for the characters and putting the Overworld / level map system into the game.  

Putting the Animation Blueprints together seemed like a tough challenge since I had no clue about animation blueprints before this sprint, but after learning and successfully integrating their use into the game, I can say that Unreal has once again made a completely user friendly part of game development that makes complicated tasks seems so simple.  The first major task of the animation blueprints was actually the hardest one.  I had to figure out how to rotate the bottom half of the character skeletal mesh joint towards the velocity of the character while keeping the top half pointed towards where the player was aiming.  This was much more complicated than just having an animation run when an enemy was chasing the player, but was a great starting point for me because now I almost completely understand the workflow, the node similarities and pretty much everything that is possible in the animation blueprints.  While I haven’t completely switched over to using the animation blueprints in this regard, I will make sounds and particle systems activate through the animation blueprints because it’s most likely the easiest way to manage sounds and VFX playing in the game.

The second major prototyping feat that I was able to accomplish was creating a base for the Overworld system.  In this prototype, the player can move between level waypoints in the level map (Which is zoomed in when the player selects a specific world). When the player selects the specific level they want to play, the screen will zoom in and fade out resulting in the loading screen just appearing as a seamless connection between the Overworld system and each level map.  In terms of the artistic representation this is huge because it means the player will have a constant experience without having to take a break in the gameplay.  While it is a massive improvement to have the beginnings of this system in place, the next iteration will be to have UI above each level waypoint, and to completely rid the system of the little bugs that pop up.  Another design question is whether I want the player at the end of each level to go back to this world map, or do I want the player to be able to launch right into the next level.  On one hand the seamless transition back to the world map would seem to the player like there wasn’t much difference, but the ability to rapidly play through levels could be a big interest to the player and since they can replay the level they just played with a push of a button.. Why can’t they just jump to the next one too?

The next major step for me personally will be to integrate these two systems to create the perfect workflow so creating levels will be a breeze.

This was the first sprint where we got to implement some art assets into the prototypes that we are planning on challenging with, and it was very exciting to really see how our art pipeline and development will flow together.  Additionally, I worked exclusively on two of the final three prototypes for this sprint and was able to make the general design idea into a playable and fun prototype.

The first prototype that I continued to iterate with was the Shadows Shooter game where the player must fend off against their ‘demon’s (for now that implies grey capsules) by staying away from the shadows and shooting back.  The prototype has a FEAR bar as well as a HEALTH bar to indicate the amount of control the character (and player) has in the situation as well as the player’s eventual lose state.  The environment was created with modular assets by Colton and I was able to make the small environment seen in the Gif above. The benefits of continuing with this game would be the interesting idea of having shadows as the enemy as well as being able to truly innovate with weapon choices.  However the downsides for our team include the vast amount of art that would be needed as well as me having to work on level design much more heavily than any other prototype.

The second prototype that I worked on was the Twin Stick Toybox Shooter where the players must work together with limited bullets to clear out a level in very limited time.  However the bullets do bounce throughout the environment/off the enemy bullets and eachother making the game have many WOW moments as well as crucial spots for teamwork.  This prototype and game idea is my personal favorite as it would allow me to be fully creative with common game types (Twin stick shooter) but adding very unique game elements to add innovation. Some ideas that have already been implemented are the fact that enemies can only be killed by a specific player, making the teamwork crucial, as well as a dash that can be used through walls, the ability to pick up bullets that have not hit an enemy and different enemy types that test the players mobility as well as quick decision making skills.  Most of the team members also see this game as our best chance to really put together our skill-sets and provide a fulfilling vertical slice, so I am very interested to hear back from professors and other students about their opinions on the game prototypes-.