Specter Inspector

Bryant has made great progress creating a system of player movement. It allows the player to move in the four cardinal dirctions and features a fixed camera. Our team decided that houses will have distinct floors to differentiate them from the outside once the walls and ceiling has faded away. Daniel has made a really nice house with two porches! He has also been working on modeling a clock tower based off of some real life photos for extra realism. Eric has made sample 3-D character models for the the ghost along with a brand new logo to represent our product. Halvor created a rudimentary environment to walk around and blocks representing houses the ghost player can float through. He also worked on setting up this blog until the time comes to integrate Bryant's movement system and Daniel and Eric's models into the basic environment we have started with.

So during this week I (Eric) used my modular model for the character models to make the Inspector and an enemy. I used multiple parts from the inspector model when making the enemy to decrease the time of model making. I also worked on making my own textures that can be repeatable when applied to a model. Daniel worked on learning ZBrush as some additional modeling software. He also made it so that the models for the houses have more personality by shrinking some of the vertices. Bryant worked on the battle system. In the beginning of the code he worked on having the characters fighting spawn into the gameworld on opposite sides. He will continue working on the battle system with things such as player controlled actions, turn order and enemy AI. Halvor has been working on triggering events. This goes along the line of people entering houses and the houses disappearing like we planned in the original design of the game. He also worked on having a combat scene trigger. This involves walking into a character and the scene activating going to Bryants battle system he made.

Leading up to this week, Halvor explored enemy encounters in the overworld, and explored different situations where they would take place (e.g. within buildings, when approaching wandering NPCs in the wild)

This week, I was able to create a town hall model using the modular method, a longer basic house model, and some other doodads. I also experimented with realistic textures for our buildings, but Professor Oldenburg recommended a less “grounded” approach, given the setting of our game and its emerging art style. I’ll continue to see what works best and apply that.

Since the last update, Eric worked on creating better looking characters, as well as a basic enemy model. He intends to keep using the modular building method for creating other characters in the game, which should save us time and resources. He was also able to add an attack animation and a moving animation.

Bryant has a lot of back-end engineering going on, some of which includes turn orders and states between players and enemies for his battle phase, enemy AI implementation, and camera work. He also settled on an active battle system for our game (more on that next week), with the intent to expand the field to 3 player-controlled characters vs. 3 AI-controlled enemies. Right now, the focus is establishing the ground work for us to readily enter that phase of development.

For week ten, development of Spector Inspector continues to move along smoothly. On the programming side of development, I, Bryant, continued to focus on developing an active turn based combat system featuring Inspector Spector and an enemy that he'd encounter. I ran into some complications regarding coding it, as I believed that creating an enemy AI(artificial intelligence) would be easier than it actually is. As mentioned in week-9, I have the back-end aspect of the battle system working, as I prepare to move forward to create a main menu, a pause menu, and a system that portrays the stats of the current party, beginning with Inspector Spector.

For Halvor's work in programming, he found much success with creating and finalizing his scripts that would allow the main character to walk through buildings - or at least, give the player the allusion of walking through buildings as they disappear upon contact. Through this time, Halvor fine-tuned the player movement script, allowing the player to rotate Inspector Spector in the overworld.

As we found our art-style for Inspector Spector, Eric has begun to move forward with creating textures that are repeatable and ready to use within Unity. Exploring different textures, Eric's work has made the Overworld look more exciting, as the programmer art has begun to be transitioned out. Moving forward, Eric has begun to work on interiors for the houses, allowing for player exploration in the Overworld to be increased.

On the other side of the art-team, Daniel has been focusing on iterating his designs for the houses that have appeared in each of our milestone presentations so far. For example, he's been adding roofing, and minor details to the houses that makes them feel more complete. Another one of his focuses as we move forward in development, is identifying and understanding what file exports from Autodesk Maya works best with Unity.

This week I had worked on fixing the interior of one the houses. This involved resizing everything to be more accurate to the inspector model which it was not in the past. I had then worked on texturing the interior to make it more colorful instead of the blank white in unity. Some trouble occurred where the textures did not carry over properly and some models were missing textures. I am currently working on fixing that thinking it may be a file type issue. I then made a new texture to be used as roofing tiles due to the original roof having errors occur with the fade out mechanic. This would hopefully solve that problem while not losing the stylistic version of the roof. I had then modeled a lamp to be used in the overworld so that it can be an extra light source. I created the model to be low poly so that it would not hurt the run rate of the game.

The last thing I did was edit the ghost sounds we made last week so that they are constantly making noise. This resulted in a very cartoonish type of character that would be making noises that sound more like simlish then English due to it being nonsense in the mic. The next part of the project im going to be working on is making a basic new character and fixing the old ones to have their head more attached to he body. Then I will be working on making new interiors for the rest of the buildings so that when people phase into them they are not looking at a blank interior. I also plan on fixing the interior that had been having texturing issues this week as well. I plan on getting these done by next Monday which will be our final playtest of the semester.

The modeling team and I have gone back and forth a lot dealing with issues of building transparency interfering with the render order. This issue is particularly bad with more complicated houses and roofing decoration. Luckily these issues entirely evaporated after switching to the High Definition Render Pipeline. Our primary script used to fade houses when entering them had to be updated to use new APIs but it was relatively seamless. The primary reason for switching render pipelines was to get access to volumetric fog objects which really add to the spooky nature of the world. Additionally, it has inspired our modelers to make more use out of glass materials.

For movement, invisible boundaries were added that teleport the player to the other side of the map sort of seamlessly. Additionally, the player can sink into the fog or rise up with the world pushing the player to standard height. We also have the same special camera script that follows the player from the same orientation from before. There are now also triggers for starting dialog or combat.

For combat, we recently overhauled everything, building off lessons learned from previous work. The player and the enemy have three actions: attack, heal: and shield. The attack (possess) does 1 damage normally, 0 if they other shields (incorporealize) and double if they are trying to heal (astral restore). On the combat trigger, both members rise to the clouds and face each other. The player has three buttons to choose their action from. After one member is defeated both return to the surface.

Hey everybody, Bryant here with a brand new update regarding the development of Inspector Spector as we finalize the prototype for the game to present and share with others. In the programming side of developing, we’ve found that a turn-based RPG system was too much for an individual to develop, and have decided to shift our combat system from a turn-based system to a system that is similar to the concept of rock, paper, scissors. With this system, it is simple enough to implement, while it demonstrates the narrative of the game, too.

Personally, it is upsetting that the RPG system was too much to do, but I think that being able to cut mechanics and implement others is an important part of the process. Outside of developing the game, we’ve had the opportunity to enter the University of Baltimore’s Game Lab, which has a room dedicated to recording sound effects and dialogue and we’ve experimented with that.

We were able to record voice-lines for the main character, as well as get a sense of what we want our non-playable characters to sound like. As we prepare to present our prototype, we believe that the general framework of the game is done, and we’ll be able to add narrative and start to build up on the game.

As previously mentioned, I spent the last few weeks iterating on building models I’ve created, while in the process of learning the workflow for properly importing them onto the project and loading them onto the scene. I’ve learned how to attach scripts, a collider, and change material behaviors in order for them to render properly. Prior to transitioning our project to the HD Render Pipeline, I had trouble modifying the buildings so that they would render correctly when materials are set to transparent (inside Unity). For instance, certain roof tiles in the back of the house can be seen from the front. This made for a jarring visual experience.

Once technical issues were resolved, I experimented with making minor changes to what became our base building, longHouse, so we can have multiple instances of what is essentially the same model scattered across the town.

As far as the overall visuals is concerned, the team and I are pleased with the emergent art style that came about through this project. The combination of stylized buildings, simple character designs, and fog have given us a clear vision of what we want to populate the world with as we continue this project in the Spring. Interestingly, it’s also informed us of where we’d like to take the story of the game in the future.

First attempt at making buildings disappear

Houses fading to reveal interiors

Quick combat demonstration