Sean Gibson's ePortfolio

  The Final Prototype is officially done! And this final sprint has definitely been the most intense yet. While not perfect, I’m very happy with the game that me and my team have made, and I feel a lot of motivation to start a brand new project! But before I get ahead of myself, it’s a great time to reflect on the last two weeks and this project as a whole. To start off our final sprint, I once again made adjustments to the pole vaulting. I made the impulse of the vault scale with how close you got to the pole, which meant that not only could the player not get an immense movement boost from a standstill, but also that there was now a “sweet spot” to aim for to get the most vertical height out of the vault. To help players seek out this sweet spot, I also took the time to create a charge-indicating progress bar next to the player that would fill up the closer they got to the sweet spot. The bar progressively fills as the player approaches the sweet spot After this, my lead de...

  This sprint has been quite an eventful one! To start off, I revamped the pole-vaulting mechanics for this sprint’s playtest! I started by creating a new enumerator that would allow me to create different “stages” of the pole vault. The first of these states is the “Ready” state that the player begins in. In this state, you can see a red line trace that shows where your pole is going to be planted. In the previous version, this was only visible when the player held down left click. Now, by pressing left click, the player “plants” their pole and enters the next state. Pole Vault Ready State Next is the “Planted” state. In this state, the player’s pole is anchored to wherever the line trace connected to when they entered the state. If the player moves too far away from the anchor point, they go back into the Ready state. But as the player moves closer to the anchor point, they move more slowly. This is to simulate the resistance of the pole “flexing” as the player moves closer...

  Sprint 3 of Thunder Vault’s development has ended! This sprint has been a pretty exciting one, with our first digital playtest, some good feedback, and a lot of big changes to come! Starting with the playtest, we had the player set up in a simple level with some obstacles to vault over and walls to bounce off of. I wanted to give the player some kind of goal, so I made an enticing tower in the middle of the level that required 4 increasingly hard jumps to ascend. This proved pretty effective! All of the playtesters that I watched tried multiple times to climb the tower, although I think I was the only one who was able to reach the top sadly. This indicated to me that while the mechanics felt comfortable to me, they were not nearly as intuitive for our playtesters. We also lacked any kind of tutorial or how to play section, meaning we had to explain the controls to our testers verbally. I would like to somehow design our next level in a way that encourages the player to explor...

  The game has made a great deal of progress in our second sprint! With the unreal project and gthub set up, it was finally time to start programming the movement. I started with the Unreal Third Person Template, because it comes with a functional player character using Unreal’s Character Movement Component, as well as a nice level to play around with the movement. I began by tweaking the parameters of the Character Movement Component. The Lead Designer wanted the player to build up speed on the ground that can be translated to the air using the pole vault, and so I raised the max speed on the player and lowered the acceleration, which made our character control not dissimilarly to how Sonic The Hedgehog might. The next tweak I made was greatly lowering the jump height. While we still wanted the jump to be an option, we want players to rely heavily on the pole vault for moving vertically. With the basic movement configured to how we liked, now it was time to start with the pole...

  In CAGD 370, my new group and I have just started working on a new project currently titled Thunder Vault! It’s a 3D Platformer where the player has to rely on their pole vaulting skills and momentum-based physics to clear levels as quickly as possible! Andrew Kostlan is the Lead Designer, Anish Neupane is the Producer, and I am the Programmer of this project. In our first 2 week sprint, We’ve set up our backlog, developed and tested our paper prototype, and created our Unreal Project File and set up Github Version Control from within the project! As the Programmer, I was the one to set up the Unreal Project this week. I chose Unreal Engine version 5.5.3 since it’s the latest release, so that we’ll have access to all the latest features during development. The next thing I did was set up Git Version Control within Unreal. I recently purchased a new computer, and didn’t move over anything from my old machine so that I could have a fresh, uncluttered start. A consequence of this th...

  My level underwent some drastic changes between v1 and v2, I ended up scrapping my v1 and starting over as I believed it didn’t provide a good foundation for me to build upon, but that some of the encounters I made could be reused. Overall I think my changes made a significant positive impact on my level. For starters, I separated individual mechanics into their own sections where they could be introduced and interacted with at a steady pace, so as to not overwhelm the player. This structure was fun to work with because it was very modular and I could easily design short but fun challenges for the player to overcome with breaks and checkpoints in the middle. This also made the critical path of the level extremely easy to follow, as the Player was always looking for the exit door in every room. Some mechanics I thought were implemented well were textboxes, Chompers, Switches, and Doors. I implemented some text boxes that helped the player know what to expect, as well as provid...