Sean Gibson's ePortfolio

  This sprint, I focused on creating a second modular kit that could function for both the brick warehouse found on experimentation as well as the brick walls found within the facility. The warehouse kit was much simpler than last sprint’s scaffolding, so the modeling portion was very easy. The difficult part of this kit was setting up the UVs so that the brick texture would tile well on the trim sheet. The approach I took to this was to make the bricks align with the same grid I used in maya, so a 10x10 grid, with each brick occupying a 2x1 space on that grid. This worked surprisingly well! Some pieces needed to be shifted and scaled around so that the tiling would be smooth, but this was still pretty easy. The second texture I needed to create was the sheet metal that the roof of the warehouse is made out of. To accomplish this, I booted up designer and got a hold of a tiling gradient bitmap. I converted that gradient to normal data, and then by applying that to the texture...

References Tri Count: 2560 Floors Grates A, B, C Grate Trims A, B Notes: I Subdivided the bigger floors so I could cut them all into pieces that would stack on top of each other, using less texture space Railings Railings A, B, and S Railing Corners (Inner and Outer) Railing Flip Flops (Left and Right) Railing End Pieces (Left and Right) Notes: I made the flip flops because using two consecutive corners doesn’t snap correctly. Stairs Stair Railing Inner Bend Stair Railings (Left and Right) Stairs A and B Notes: Stair Railing Inner Bend allows us to make staircases with as many floors as we like

  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...