Jake McKenna PPJ03

General Updates: 

This week was probably really about structure, story, and game-wise. We spent a lot of time defining how the game, and team will work going forward. 



Personal Updates:

Malcolm and I are sharing the "Art Lead" role to help the other GDAP people know where to put work in and how to integrate that work with unity. The plan is that having us around will smooth out any concerns about not knowing what to do or how to get work  on screen. From this point on everyone with questions about art work should reach out to us, be that artists needing direction or programmers wanting updates. 


I worked on making a new concept for the Village in level 1. I started on paper, went to maya, then unity, then back to maya and ended up in unity finally. The idea was to give the player a more basic version of the loop shown in the later city level. The twist being that there are actually 2 'loops', an inner ring and an outer. Enemies exist on both rings to guide the player around the loop.
Time spent on Village Concept > Playable in Unity: 4-5hrs



Aside from attending all the meetings generally, I did a short overtime session after the art meeting to help smooth out some story structure concerns. We have been having difficulties defining exactly how the story will appear in the game, and be represented by X number of levels. Having worked out the art pipeline we agreed that 5 good levels seem doable, and so, I came up with this (see pic below) adaptation of a basic "Save the Cat" story structure to fix the game. The benefit of nailing down this structure is that we can move forward with creating levels and building environments while the story is still being written. 
Time spent in meetings (general): 5.5hrs
Meeting overtime (my structure ted talk): 45mins

I also spent a little extra time with Jake D. trying to work out ship movement and control stuff. I found out that by increasing the minimum air speed to 50 the ship becomes buoyant in the air, and significantly easier to control. This slight speed tweak makes it so the ship cant fall out of the sky for losing momentum, you do still slow to a crawl, but you aren't left flopping like a fish in the smog sea. I got some really positive feedback on the change from playtesters.

Toying with movement and working out bugs in call: 2hrs


Time making moodboards for levels: 30mins


Total Time(estimate): 12-13hrs






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