Dodos Semester Wrap Up

The following is what I contributed to The Last March of the Dodos Fall Semester 2012.

Modeled all three current levels

My biggest tangible contribution to the game was getting levels constructed. When I joined the team they didn't have any decent levels modeled at all. They had a boxy weird level that didn't work very well. So the first thing I decided to do was take some of designs Troy had drawn on paper and turn them into something playable.

These are the drawings I was given by Troy to build the levels from. The drawings are immediately followed by the model that I built that are now in game. The models have some weird geometry that is a result from having to have the rocks built into the level so collision works properly.

Level 1

Model of Level 1

Level 2, not in game currently.

This shows level 2 in the first stage of construction.

Level 3

Model of Level 3

Level 4

Model of Level 4

Textured/Painted/Added Doodads to all three current levels

Texturing the levels took a little bit of thinking about how it was going to be done. Brandon and I ended up deciding to go with a vertex painter that we found on the Unity Store. The vertex painter was effective because we could paint a level relatively quickly and designate areas to have different textures. We could then swap textures in and out and also change how often any texture tiles very easily. The biggest limitation we have using this method is that the vertex painter is limited to only 4 different textures per shader.

The picture below shows Level 1 after it was painted and had doodads added to it.

This picture shows the same level but with the old color scheme.

Reworked the Hammer Trap model

This is the old design of the hammer trap. The entire contraption looks rather weak. It needed a redesign desperately.
This is the current model for the hammer trap that I remodeled. I rebuilt the stand to be more bulky. This design makes the entire trap more visible from the camera perspective in game. I also added a few more edge loops to the head of the hammer to make it look more curved.
This is the current look of the hammer. Jesse made the texture.

Animated the Bear Trap model

This is the animation for the bear trap. Like the hammer trap I hopped in to relieve pressure off some of the artists to get some work done so they could focus on other things. Making this animation was pretty straight forward. however, we did have a problem with getting into Unity properly. The animation would play for the individual traps wouldn't disappear as they were supposed to. We originally used the visibility channel to try and make them disappear, which wasn't working. Then we tried to scale them to 0 when they were supposed to disappear but that didn't work either. Eventually we settled on just moving the used traps in the -Y so that they would instantly jump below the playing field and would disappear when they were supposed to.

Figured out FBX pipeline that all animations with models (traps and dodo) were exported and imported with

There was an issue with the way animations were getting into the game. We were exporting our models and animations to FBX format, then cutting up the animation into takes in Motion Builder so that it was easier for our engineers to handle in Unity. The problem was that the way we were exporting it would make the animation wig out and the rig and model would deform in unintended ways. At this point I worked on the process via trial and error until eventually figuring out the proper way to export so that everything worked as intended. Unfortunately the discovered export method didn't work for the squash and stretch deformers we had on several models and I didn't have the time to figure it out before our IGF submission. Overall this was very helpful because it freed Brandon up to continue working on the art while I figured out the problem.

Designed water/lava system with Kamron and others

I worked with Kamron to decide how to make the water and lava look better. The water looked too static, especially against the shore of the levels. We decided to apply the undulation that was on the lava to the water as well. This decision helped break up the shoreline a bit and make the water looks more dynamic. There were some problems with making the water undulate and maintain its reflective shader. However, we were able to figure out how to make it work.

Helped Brandon and Jesse manage art pipeline and assign tasks

The main thing that the Dodos team needed when I joined was art support. The art pipeline was in bad shape. This was basically because Brandon was overloaded. Christine was struggling with contributing usable assets. Dave was working on things that weren't even going to get into the game and working at an incredibly slow rate at that. All of the artists needed to be sped up on their asset creation. The first step to speeding up the art creation was to organize the pipeline. Once I was helping with art I was able to bring Jesse into the art pipeline as well. Pretty much every 3D asset was then touched by me, Brandon, and Jesse once we started cranking on things.

Assisted Jesse on Color Palette decisions

I helped Jesse figure out a color palette to apply to the game. Our original colors were just the colors that came with some textures we were using. The colors weren't necessarily working well together so we decided to make a more unified color palette  We used Adobe Kuler to help generate the initial palette then we tweaked it a bit from what Kuler spit out. We will be continuing to work on the color palette until we feel its just right. This is just a step in the right direction.

Cut the long trailer/Gameplay Demo

I made the first gameplay demo for our game. We needed a demo to submit with our game to IGF so the judges would know how to play and be able to see the key points of the game. I fraps'd a lot of gameplay footage of myself playing and edited it down. I also made a voice over to the demo to make sure everything was clear about how the game was supposed to be played.

Cut the short trailer

I also made the short trailer. This trailer is less than a minute long and is comprised of shorter cuts. This trailer is more of a true trailer and not really a gameplay demo. I still need to do some work on the informational transitions.

Heavily influenced new trap functionality, new color indicators, encouraged chaining

One of the other problems that Dodos had when I joined the team was that it was very hard for a player to actually chain traps in a meaningful way. I pushed heavily for the ability for the player to choose where movement traps, the boot and hammer, knocked dodos to. First the player could see the minimum and maximum range that he traps could launch dodos to. This range was shown by the green ring that appears around a trap during placement. During placement the player could also choose exactly where the dodo would go and the arc that the dodo would travel on. This was displayed with a visible arc that moved based on where the mouse cursor was.

This image shows the player using the new system with the boot trap.