Dev Update 03/20/19

Oh, hey! I didn’t see you there. Please, come in.

Done since last post

Our efforts since the last post have been concentrated on bringing everything together for a playable demo. We completed the zooming mechanic and combined the archery and swordfighting minigames into a larger scene containing enemies. The player can teleport into a minigame spot and use the corresponding weapon to fight the enemies. Currently the minigames are in fixed spots on the map. We intend to change this later by allowing the player to place down minigame towers in different locations, but for this demo it worked well as a proof of concept, and people were able to understand the mechanic intuitively.

For enemy pathing, we used the Bezier curve package discussed in our last blog post. It works well for this purpose, and the enemies twist back and forth along the path in a pleasing way. The curve is easy to edit, which we needed to do several times to keep enemies from clipping into level objects. We found that the path should turn around and wind back on itself in places to keep the enemies in view of the player and allow multiple opportunities for combat, particularly in the archery minigame.

The archery and swordfighting minigames themselves received some polish to be playable in the demo. Initially we placed the archery spot at the top of a high tower, thinking that this would give players a good vantage point to shoot the enemies below. However, through playtesting we discovered that it was too high, and players were unable to hit enemies that were that far away. We shortened the archery tower to about half of its original height and that was much more effective at facilitating combat. We also discovered that hitting an enemy’s shield (designed for the swordfighting minigame) with an arrow counted as hitting its body and would kill it. This does not make sense intuitively, but mechanically it makes archery a lot easier and more fun, so we will have to keep that in mind when designing enemy models.

While not implemented currently in our holistic demo, we’ve also developed a proof-of-concept scene for the manipulation and placement of towers in the strategy layer.  Towers can be attached to the hand and then locked to designated nodes on the table, at which point a prefab is spawned containing hooks for the teleporting logic that allows us to zoom to the tower and any game objects relevant to its corresponding minigame.

During some rudimentary testing of this proof-of-concept scene, we noticed a strange figure that none of us recall adding into the game.  This occurrence could not be reproduced. We would like to assure our playerbase that we have most definitely removed horse from this game as of this update, so the bug is likely unrelated.

Next steps

While we have proof-of-concept implementations of both, neither the spear-throwing minigame nor the catapult minigame has been integrated into our holistic demo, so this still remains to be done.  The spear-throwing game needs some polish, as currently the spears lack the special physics necessary to feel good to throw. While the archery scene and the swordfighting scene were easy enough to implement to satisfaction with the assets on hand, the catapult scene in particular suffers without custom mesh assets.  As such, generating these models will become a priority as well.

Enemy behavior will be particularly important for making this feel like a game rather than a collection of VR tech demos. We still need to refine our ideas on how specifically enemies are created, move across the world, and attack. Tower defense games are a high-level inspiration for this project, so we may do something similar where you can only allow a certain number of enemies across the board before you lose (The Lab’s archery minigame works like this as well and it is pretty effective). We also need to decide whether the enemies should attack towers directly or if they should ignore them and head straight for the goal. We also need to integrate the tower placement mechanic into the main game, and this will be relevant to how the enemies navigate, since for example a catapult should be positioned in a place where it can hit a large group at once.

As more of a long-term goal, sound sounds nice to have.  The archery scene currently has sound effects implemented, which adds a better feel of feedback to the physical actions.  One of our members is looking into options for the soundtrack; however, for most of the other sound design we are prioritizing art before sound.

Until next time: keep em’ hangin’ loose and tidy, crowd!