Sea of the Falling Sun Dev Blog #2

The second week of our production has been a very productive one. This week the team powered through to get the main core mechanics done as well as getting the menu sorted.

This week we also spent some time learning about animating in Autodesk Maya, how to create key frames and creating a smooth animation. We managed to create a bouncing ball. While not particularly helpful for this project itself, this will come in handy in future projects we may do. I find working with Maya quite interesting, being able to model, rig and animate in it quite effectively. It's definitely a program that I want to work with more and learn more about.

Now as for work on Sea of the Falling Sun. I was working on creating the menu for the game. The image below is what I created for the main menu image.

I tried to create a battle type atmosphere for the image, having the three main objects in the game; the aircraft carriers, the submarines and the enemy planes. Once the image was in the Unity project I started working on creating the menu. I added the title of the game, text saying what buttons/keys to press for the buttons to become inter-actable as well as the buttons themselves. I ended up making the buttons myself in Adobe Photoshop.

I thought that the best button for the game would be to go with a military/navy aesthetic. I thought that since it'll be taking place in the water that maybe a metal plaque would look good with some screws in it. While I was working on it Shien suggested to add rust to it, to make it look like it's been in the water for a while. I ended up using the default Photoshop brushes as well as some of Gawki's custom brushes. The brushes can be found;

https://www.etsy.com/au/listing/518416145/2017-photoshop-brushes?ref=shop_home_active_2

Shien was working on getting the controller assignment and allocation working. He was supposed to work on some of the game mechanics as well however the controller settings took a while to do. He wanted to ensure the code was as simple as possible while also being able to complete all the required tasks and not clutter the code. So Shien got Roman to work on the other gameplay mechanics for him, so he could focus on getting the controller settings working for the game as they are important and will affect whether the game will be played in single player mode of local co-op mode.

Roman this week was working on pretty much the main gameplay mechanics. He worked on getting the planes to fly down and explode when they hit the water and ships, the player mechanics, getting the explosions to work and cause a chain reaction with nearby planes. Roman had essentially created a working game by the end of this week.

With the main test scene pretty much completed I was able to link the button from the menu to push the test scene when the button has been pressed. For next week we want to polish the game, get the score working and just adding any extra things to make the game more fun, as well as getting others to test the game.