Swamp Work

Last weekend we had a really good turnout at the play-test. We probably had 45-50 people attending and many of them were between 8-17 which gave us a great raw opinion on the game. We had several EAE students show up as well who provided many good suggestions. We have compiled the surveys and our observations and a quickly working to make changes before this Saturday's first release for Xbox indie game testing.

For the week I have been fully committed to finishing the swamp levels. I have artistically designed both Jon and Nicks swamp levels. I built both with the export work and everything but we ran into some issues with the way they were set up. Much of our struggle we found were because of groups between the DrawMesh and Collision mesh so the translates didn't work properly. Second, some of the textures that were on James's assets were jpgs and not in the proper size but those are a quick fix.

To resolve this I had to go back into each objects fbx file and delete the group, re-position and freeze transformations. After I fixed all the fbx files then I had to reimport all the objects and place them in the maya scene again. I have completely fixed nicks and I wanted to make sure all the exports worked properly in game before I started reworking Jon's swamp level. Tonight Nick told me everything was fixed so tomorrow/today I will fix Jon's. It should only take about 2 hours or so to fix everything.

Also during my work tonight I added a walk cycle into the bow draw. During our play test on saturday people didn't like that they were locked into place during the bow charge so this should fix the issue.

Besides all that I did some quick promotional art for our twitter and Facebook page, cleaned up both pages and made several updates on our progress. Yesterday I found a local printing company that would be willing to do a product line of t-shirts and stuff for us to link up with the page. I mostly wanted to do some t-shirts for hand outs during this summers game competitions and at the end of the semester on campus to promote other students support.

The water and background are not completed on either but we are looking more for the bright colors of this bottom picture to match the game. Also the brighter tree textures will be in both.