Week 9

Week 9 was a little slower than previous weeks with a few assignments from this and other courses keeping me busier than I would have liked. When I did have downtime, I worked to polish the UI and camera behavior in the game.

Beta Fishing

As we get even closer to the Beta for Life After Death, one of the aesthetic choices we had decided upon last week was use tick marks to signify moth deaths. These tick marks would be shown during the new respawn screen that is shown in between deaths. Sandy is a great job of creating a custom tick mark font that matched our aesthetic and looked just perfect for the game. I then took that font and wrote some simple logic that converted the death count to a base 5 system that could be represented with ticks. Implementation wasn’t very difficult, and the end result was effective, a rare easy win!

Finally, I tweaked the “Chase Camera” script slightly so that the follow dampening was a little snappier meaning the moth stays a bit closer to the camera. This made the moth easier control as it was a lot easier to judge depth and gage exactly where the moth was in space.

Almost there

Our team is excited with our progress and we’re trying to balance new ideas and modifications with the need to polish and get what we have to a more playable state. Over the next week we’ll be mostly putting a freeze on new features and run another user tester sooner rather than later so we’re better able to act on the feedback received there before the beta is due.