I'm Free Production Blog 5

I'm Free Sprint 5

We have reached the last legs of the production pipeline with the end of Sprint 5 now. Mostly we've finished our features with the enemies being the one last feature to focus on. For this sprint, I was assigned 5 cards with a total of 8 points. With the cards from the previous sprint, I completed 8 cards with a total of 12 points. Needless to say, this has been a rather productive sprint for me. 

The card I finished first was tweaking the walls of our small levels as in the feedback people mentioned how the walls obstructed the view of the player, especially the hallway rooms where each room is smaller. I went through the prefabs I had completed thus far and made sure the smaller rooms did not have the front and back walls. At the same time, I finished implementing the assets and the lighting into the Zoo level and sent them into "To Verify". 

The next cards I focused on were the cards for the Military level. The first card I focused on was "As a level designer, I need to implement the military base assets into my level to match the tone and theme" which is the asset implementation card for this level. Since I've done this two times already, the process went a bit faster. I also swap the roles of the shutters and the fence from the Zoo level to the military level. The fence which was the "walls" in the Zoo level are now "punchable assets" in the Military level. Then it was the same for the shutters which were "punchable" in the Zoo but now "walls" in the Military. This meant they had to be new prefabs because their roles were swapped. The "walls" wouldn't have a rigid body that allowed them to be punched and flying out from the level. 

An issue I encountered shortly after was that the zoo level still had unpacked prefabs. So I had to go back and replace any and all prefabs that are not properly implemented or using the correct prefab. This was to be a meticulous and attentive task so this issue would not arise again in the future. I really hope all prefabs are properly and correctly added so I would not have to go back and delete and re-add the assets. 

Military level made into prefabs and added to script

Next, I worked on the lighting which went as smoothly as the Zoo level's, which is to say, they were troubling. The Lab level's lighting was easily done as it was interior lighting. But for the Zoo level and military level, their lighting was to be imitating outdoor light, which is different and more difficult. We decided that lighting would vary between levels, so we would not be able to use a directional light without creating a script that would turn on and off groups of directional lights whenever the player reaches a new level. Our programmer is already busy with other features, so it was decided to look for a way to create individual lighting. This led to the lighting being uneven within each room itself because each level had a handful of spotlights and point lights to try and light up the room(s). The line between grounds/floors would be apparent and it was sometimes obvious to see a spotlight or point light. When this issue was brought up to the team, our programmer mentioned that we should try to bake light into levels. However, with an electronic prototype coming up, this was to be a card left for the next sprint. 

Lab Lighting (Interior lighting easier done)

Zoo Lighting (Trying to imitate bright daytime, exterior lighting)

Military Lighting (Trying to imitate evening, sunset exterior lighting)

As the level designer cards for the sprint are complete, I moved on to help with audio. I was assigned cards that asked for a siren/alarm sound effect, a menu shuffle SFX, and background ambiance for the Zoo level. Luckily I worked on audio back in Parasitic so I didn't have any troubles with audio. I looked on freesound.org for audio as all audio was allowed to be used and edited for free. It's a great site. I then moved the audio files into Audacity for clean up and looping. My process is first cleaning audio or any background sounds and trimming parts that I don't need. If they need to be looped, I would find a few seconds of the end at a zero position and fade it out. I would then move the end to the beginning and fade in the seconds of the beginning in alignment with the end clip that was moved. This makes a rather seamless loop. 

Example of seamless loop

I also combined audio together to get a certain ambiance. For example, the Zoo level's ambiance is windy with bird noises. I found a decent length of windy audio and looped it. Then I looked for an isolated bird sound audio that was lengthy and looped it as well. I combined the two audio together to get a windy background ambiance with occasional bird calls. 

Wind audio combined with isolated bird sounds

I looked for three different clips for the three different audio cards I did. The menu sound effect cards had 4 different audio clips because I wasn't sure which would fit the game. The only problem I had with this card would just be Trello's max file size. To combat this, I imported the assets to the Google Drive and linked them in the cards before sending them to "To Verify". 

This would be the end of the work I did for Sprint 5. The next sprint would be focused on fleshing out our last level, the Forest. After that, I would need to tweak the levels based on feedback and constantly playtest the levels. The last thing would be adding the enemies to the levels when they are fully developed and programmed. Until Sprint 6!