Production/Design DevLog #3

Okay so my numbering system for these DevLogs has gone out of wack, I think I'm just gonna start combining both production and design together, for ease of mind. Anyways so this week has been huge for Project Sky, on both the design end and then the overall production end. In the design area, most of the level is complete and the course is feeling better. What I've spent most of my time doing this week is working with the course itself, and only making minor tweaks to the level. This is because Ashley is going in and doing the terrain now, so I don't want to make any drastic changes on here. We've also gotten feedback saying that the level looks a lot like Millennium Park, so too may more changes might stray from that path. As far as the course goes, there is still a bunch of work to be done there. I've been adding in more wind currents, creating VFX for them (which the implementation took longer than I thought), and adjusting where rings are. One of the biggest feedback notes has been that the course is too hard, with people not being able to finish the course. So I've been looking at that and how to make the level easier. I also worked on adding in a prototype GUI, which will get better as we move further into production.

    Speaking of production, I mentioned it was a big week as well. We're well into the Vertical Slice phase, having completed two successful milestones already. The game is still on track, as I've been watching animations for the character come in and after a quick art meeting, I've got a better idea as to how long its going to take before the scene is fully textured. While we did suffer a very minor setback with the character animation, it looks like things are getting back on track and the production board didn't really get derailed, which is a relief to see. We also pushed hard on the programming side, getting Parse implemented into the game and setting up online leaderboards. While there are some bugs to work out there, we can track it on the development side and see scores. We've also been meeting with external advisers, getting the game into their hands and getting their opinions. We've also been blasting build announcements on Facebook, Twitter, and TigForums, and have been getting a lot of feedback from that.