23/2 review
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During this last sprint i haven’t done much in way of what i usually do for the team, rather, i have been engaged in the act of buying my relevance within the team. Nothing like money changing hands to grease the wheels. In all seriousness though, i did purchase a license for the unity extension ferr2d that is used to create terrain based on a single set of textures that the program loops and skews rather proficiently in order to easily and quickly create decorative or physical terrain for one’s game. The reason we decided to start working with ferr was that we had previously relied on creating our environments using a handful of rock assets that we would rotate and place in the level, and since these rocks were some rather simple shapes we felt that it would be difficult to create any intricate shapes based on those shapes. So because of this change i’ve been spending quite some time familiarising myself with ferr and the afterwards using it to build our latest level draft, since we lack a designer i have been filling the role of handyman doing a bit of everything. During the start of the week i looked at how shaders and normal maps work within ferr since our game relies heavily on lighting and having that sorted early on in the process felt like it would be of the highest priority, standing without functional lighting at the next playtest would have made us all look rather silly. I immediately ran into the issue that neither the creator nor anyone else had written to any lengthy extent about the way normal works within the system. I however discovered that ferr also included a rather extensive set of shaders which after some experimentation yielded what we in the group deemed acceptable results. With the matter of the lighting settled i then proceeded to rebuild our current level all the while taking the opportunity to adapt it according to feedback we’d received and evaluation’s we had made as a group, to change the level into a more open ended layout where there are multiple paths to the end. In the previous version we had multiple areas to visit in whatever order the player wished to, but the areas themselves were almost completely linear. To encourage a more exploratory approach to the game we decided that we needed more paths to take from that would all contain something of interest, visually or in terms of gameplay.
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