Art Devlog: Introducing Amei!

The final member of our team has arrived! Amei is the most technically adept of the pilots, and enjoys precise and elegant flight - exactly as elegant as her dancing is not.

Half way point!

My goodness, we've already reached the half way point of this process! Project Sky has been in development for 10 weeks now and we've got a lot of work to show for it. So, this Friday, we'll be showing off our demo build at the DePaul Game Dev Mid-Capstone Showcase, along with the other capstone projects. This will be very exciting because it'll be the first massive public playtest for Project Sky. I'm nervous for the inevitable bugs that will appear, but am also very excited for people to play our game and see the hard work that this team has put in.

Art Devlog #3.5: Puck is here!

He now has eyebrows and some sick dance moves. Puck is more playful and mischievous than Mav or Chu - he doesn't care about fancy tricks or technical precision, he just wants to go fast!

Art/Design #1

Okay so this is just a quick run down of everything since the weekend.  So I've been hard at work making some new buildings to go in around the course.  We still want that urban feel, but with more organic shapes so I've been playing with buildings with a lot of curves and fluidity.  So far I have two basically modeled that just need some clean up on their verts to be ready for UV unwrapping.  I will also be making several more buildings later in the week.  Here are just some quick screengrabs of the buildings as they look right now.

In addition to this I also got a lot of playtesters to run through the level on Friday.  We got some really good feedback on various things including the difficulty curve, the trees needing some work, camera/movement controls, ring counters, missing ring consequences, and fairy boost/braking.  Many of these have already gotten addressed this week.

Mid-Capstone Build Check in!

Hey guys! So you've probably played (or are going to) be playing our current build of Project Sky, which is our mid-capstone build. I'm going to quickly post some images that our character animator/artist, Alice, sent us. They are three of the characters that will be seen in the game. So here's Chu, Mav, and our newest addition, Puck!

Production/Design Log #6

Hey all! It's been a busy week here at Studio Hullabaloo, but we are rolling right along to our next build, which will be up in just a couple of hours! Production wise, we ended our first production sprint (2 weeks) on Friday, and we made it! All of our goals for art, design, and programming were met. Now we are in a three week sprint that will see a lot of major updates to art, as well as our mini-game levels!

Speaking of the mini game levels, I spent a fair amount of time this weekend working on the first three, as well as polishing our intro level. For the mini games, here are some images as to what they look like. 

This upcoming week will be targetted at finishing off the main level, and adding in obstacles for the mini-game levels. I also got a chance to play more with the UI, which I will post images about next devlog.

Production/Design DevLog #5

Hey guys! So I just got back from GDC, where I had a wonderful time being a CA and meeting all sorts of wonderful people. I also got a chance to have industry vets playtest Project Sky, and get their feedback. Overall, everybody really liked the concept of the game, but found some design/programming flaws, including movement still being a bit too sensitive for first time players. These are bugs we are going to be researching moving forward. Also, in production, we are working on polishing our intro level, which we will be demoing off for the remainder of the quarter. While polishing this, we are moving forward with our character modeling and designing the main level. In class on Tuesday, we will be running a small competition, to see who can get the best time in the class.

Transitioning into design, this week has been more level and UI focused for me. I'm now working on development of our complete level, which we will be ready to show off at the start of next quarter. We're taking a new approach to Chicago, infusing nature into it and including a lot more organic architecture. We're taking Millennium Park and putting it into the Maaite's homeworld. It's exciting for us to be moving the game in this direction, and we can't wait to show off what we have. On the UI side, the menus are pretty much done and now it is going over to our programmer to connect everything together. I've always found that menus seem to be left until the last minute, so we are taking our time to produce a great structure for this, which should increase the overall player experience.

Art Devlog #2: Meet Chu!

He frowns! He walks! He... well, right now he doesn't do much else. But he's Maverick's teammate, and he's incredibly serious about flying. So serious that he wears a flight suit at all times, and only soaring through the wide-open sky can put a smile on his blue face.