With 2 weeks left before the submission of the game, the team has been working hard to improve the visual aspects of the game. Main concentration was the creation and implementing of 2D live animations and on the side, tiding up the 3D interaction animations too. The game also seen a fix up of the currently existing levels and making sure that all levels worked sound between each other. In the upcoming week, polishing of the game will continue and we will be moving onto bug testing to ensure that the game works and flows well.

A short summary of what each team member did this week:

Kris (Producer and Marketing)

This week I have been working hard to finish off the rest of the cutscene illustrations with Evie. I still had some colouring to do after last week, and then onto shading of 4 panels assigned to me. In order to finish the shading on time, it was broken down to be simplified into a flat cell shading with the maximum of 4 tonal values for each object. Some depth of field was given to several shots through the use of gaussian blur and field blur to make the image more “3D like”. I am quite happy with the result of our work and think so far, the animations are turning out awesome. In the upcoming week I will be working on the press kit and the game trailer for our game’s final submission. 

Nathan (Design Lead)

This week I spent working on implementing the mini cutscenes we plan on having between levels. Using the illustrations drawn by Kris and Evie, I added them to a number of sprite renderers in 3D space and using a parallax effect in order to achieve the different draw distances between certain elements in the cutscenes. Instead of having the individual sprites move, I instead opted to have the camera move and keep the sprites stationary. Due to how the sprites are layered, different elements will move faster than others and give a cute puppet show effect.

Evie (Art Lead and Marketing)

I was working on shading the storyboards with Kris this week. Kris gave me a guide of how she'd like the scenes shaded and I worked in accordance to her instructions. This week wasn't super challenging for me, it was just very time consuming doing all the shading. I also forgot that because of the parallax effect we're using for the animation that art behind other objects would become visible so that meant I had to go back and fix some scenes. Overall though, I'm happy with the final outcome of my work this week.

Teresa (Test Lead)

New animations for players when interacting with certain items in mini games. It was a lot of work to make sure that there minimal clipping when the player model are animated. Animations on some players are slightly different due to how the model was originally skinned. But otherwise, it's barely noticeable. I did rework the rowing animation for the boatman when he comes in on the rowboat, but the animation has yet to be implemented into the game.