Scrap Pirates – Week 4

I’ll show some of the work I have done this week and tell what I have learnt from it. But first, I will tell about a major decision which was made for our project…

Two weeks into the production we have a better understanding of how long it takes for us to make specific things and many of us realized that three unique levels is an overestimation on what we can achieve. We value quality before quantity and scaled the scope down to one level. This way we can focus all our effort into making it as polished and alive as possible.

A large part of this week has also gone to the background tiles. After testing the first version in Unity, I gathered feedback and got to know about problem areas in order to make more finalized versions. The main part was to get them tiling seamlessly. After fixing that and doing some final polishing, they should be done.

However, it was also learned that the levels will be built a lot on the vertical level as well. The backgrounds I have made don’t necessarily tile in a natural way on the height because of all the horizontal panels. So it was requested that I make a background with a new look to work as an extension on the height. We happened to miss this during the planning and production of the now finished background tiles, so there are some hours left on work until the background tiles can be checked of the list.

WIP of extension. I’m exploring what the panels look like when tiled. It will not look like this in the end.

While the backgrounds were tested, I made a panel for opening doors and a pillar to divide the backgrounds every now and then. I learnt that the rendering technique I had used on backgrounds didn’t necessarily work on the assets and was requested to remove most of the dirt and details which I had painted. I will be more attentive of this as I get to make my next asset.

There was an interesting division in the group wherein which symbol in the panel should represent “activated” and not. 50% thought that the separated hexagon represented an open door, while the remainder felt like the full hexagon represented a closed circuit and therefor should be the green, activated one. We went for the latter, but might make changes if we learn something useful during our testing.