Devlog 2: Building Momentum
Alright, we're back at it again with another Armadahex Devlog! This devlog encapsulates two weeks of work, mainly because I was sick through Week 2, and couldn't contribute much. Expect a lot more happening from now on out.
Firstly, we're down a team member, Nicholas. He was a member of the art team, which means unless we find someone else, we'll most likely not have any concept or menu art. However, this should actually not be a big problem. It'll take some more time, but we can always just get screen-captures from in-game scenes to be used in menus and promotional materials. Additionally, we can create animated hexagonal grids for the background of the menus, potentially in a shader. This should make the game look more clean and professional, if done correctly. Anyways, let's continue with the Devlog....
Back in Week 1, we had Justin record some voice lines for the game announcer. These include lines such as "Game Over!" and "Nearing Victory!". This is important for player immersion in the game.
Additionally, our new sound curator/designer Jeremy found a bunch of great sound effects. Some of them need tweaking, but most are perfect for being directly applied to the game.
Juniper continued work on Armadahex's soundtrack. We decided we'll need about 4 pieces, 2 for the menus, one "layered" endgame soundtrack, and a victory/loss soundtrack. Juniper completed the first menu music:
This past week, Week 3, we made a lot of progress with finding the ship model's we'll use in the game's release, but also placeholder models for development. For the former, we've found a ton of free low-poly models that were originally intended for 3d printing, but function fine as placeholders.
For more professional models, we collected a list of the cheapest (but hopefully reliable) 3d models for each ship design. The average price for each was about $15, which means a total cost of about $75.
Additionally, we found one free ship model, but it comes with the downside that the textures need to be baked. Our Professor, Paul, is working on that. Otherwise, the model looks pretty good:
Also in Week 3, Zoe got together the finished design for our logo! We'll probably change it a little before it goes into production, but it looks great:
In huge news, with Kyle's help, we've made significant progress in the graphical side of things. The water shader is looking great now. It still needs several important features, such as underwater refraction, reflections (maybe?), specular highlights, and foam, but even without these things, it's really coming together.
Importantly, we need to get the rough menus designed and networked, so the game can "fit in" easily. If we worked the other way around, our networking solution might be unnecessarily clunkily. Progress has already been made in this regard, with the menu designs being prototyped in Adobe XD. A lot of inspiration was drawn from one of my favorite games, Halo Infinite. Hopefully we don't get sued (joke).
These scene templates have also begun to be added into Unity. The focus currently is less on beauty, and more on functionality. Luckily, because the screen sizes in Adobe XD and Unity are the same, and font's are simple to move over, it's not been too difficult to copy the menus over. However, I did accidentally do all my work on a "stale" GitHub branch, which lead to many conflicts later on.
Now we're nearing the end of the Devlog, and we must turn our summary of the past into an outlook on the future. We're currently at the end of Week 3, and with a new week is a new schedule:
To solidify what this means, we'll be focusing first on the menus and general networking (accounts, friends, authentication) this week. After that, we can create a skeleton game and start networking it. I actually expect to fast-track this, since this upcoming week is Spring break and we'll have more time.
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