Common Art 3 - Sprint #6 / Final Delivery

For this delivery, I did final touch ups on a number of effects and some functionality issues.

The charge beam and arm cannon had a couple more effects layered on top. There is a new mesh that acts as the projectile trail that also spawns with the charge beam. A new sphere spawns with the effect when the charge beam collides with an object. A panning texture will also appear on the arm cannon the longer the charge beam is charged up to a point. A new beam effect was added to the arm cannon and hand so that you can tell where they are pointing. The left hand menu was also fixed and functions properly now. The left hand joystick moves the cursor and the arm cannon can point to the menu and trigger the different buttons.

The magma and water environment effects were also touched up. The panning emissive materials were changed to use several caustic textures layered onto each other. The niagara systems were also touched up so that they spawn spheres instead of VATs that deform from world position offset within the materials. The water also will spawn a splash effect when colliding with objects, including the arm cannon.

The new EMMI model was skinned to the rig. The EMMI scan effect will now scale up and down at the appropriate steps. The navmesh in the game over area was reduced so that it is less likely to spawn outside of the level streaming volume. The navmesh in the main room was also adjusted so that you can't teleport on top of objects that you shouldn't be able to nor outside of the room and level streaming volume. The win timer was moved to be over the ending illustration instead of over the ending credits.

 

Common Art 3 - Sprint #5 Delivery

 For this sprint I touched up on a couple of effects. The charge beam vfx has some new particle forces for some randomness. There is also a new particle effect for when the projectile hits an object. The EMMI has a new effect when it gets shot in the head with a charged shot: the head will glow more and more red for each full charged shot. When the player wins or loses, there is now a camera fade to black or red respectively. Collisions were also touched up a bit to make the projectile colliding with objects a bit more consistent.

Common Art 3 - Sprint #4 Delivery

 For this sprint I worked on fine tuning a couple effects. I created 3 VATs, 1 for a start of the water drip, 1 for a water drip loop, and another for the magma drip vfx. They still need some touch up, mostly the magma, but are making progress.

I also touched up the Arm cannon vfx. A new swirling effect was added going around the projectile and a ribbon going around the projectile while charging and the original sprites were elongated moving towards the projectile center. The pipes UVs and positions were all adjusted so the panning material on them all move in the intended direction to the next step.

Emmi also now takes 3 full charged shots to kill instead of 1.

Common Art 3 - Sprint #3 Delivery

For this delivery, I worked on several different things. There is a new game over area for winning and losing to display the end credits. The arm cannon had a number of changes. There are sound affects attached to the arm cannon for: starting to charge, charging while holding a full charged shot, shooting a non charged shot, and shooting a fully charged shot. The arm cannon also will move randomly in a small area while charging. There is now a haptic feedback while charging the shot and the right controller will vibrate.

The HUD received some updates. There is now a display for what each button does that can be hidden and recalled when needed. Some adjustments were made to some timings to accommodate new animations. A number of animations also have sounds attached to them, primarily for the EMMI moving around.

Common Art 3 - Sprint #2 Delivery

 For this sprint, I spent a good portion balancing audio so that the Emmi sound effects, the music, and the ambient sounds wouldn't be too loud compared to each other. I also helped out with connecting the new scan effect to the steps so that only the current active step would highlight while the others would not. The Emmi blueprint was also adjusted to have 2 more movement states, a scanning state and a strictly idle state, that get called at different times.

Common Art 3 - Sprint #1 Delivery

For this sprint delivery, I worked a lot on the EMMI state machine and blueprint for simple AI movement. The EMMI will patrol in the factory between 2 points and will idle for a short duration when reaching the points. The EMMI that spawns at the end will chase the player and when close enough will transition to the lunge and then perform an additional attack. 

Also worked on getting the emissive material for the switches to start off, then flash when they are the current active step, and then turn on once activated.

Common Art - Sprint #7 Delivery

 Worked a lot on audio with the steps. Most audio now has a position, attenuation, and is binaural. Also adjusted the timing of sounds from triggers to help guide the player. Removed the floating numbers to get a test of how well the different steps can be understood by a player.

Did a lot of testing with the HUD, which we decided to go back to the widget as there were problems attempting to switch it to a model. Since it was actual geometry, if you got too close to objects then it would start to clip through them. However if we moved the geometry too close to the player camera then it ends up squeezing the image together due to the left and right eye and eventually starts cutting parts off. Also, the closer the model was to the camera, the blurrier and more out of focus it becomes. While there is some issues with the widget feeling like it is going through objects when placed further away and a similar problem to the geometry when too close to the player camera, since it always displays on top of objects it doesn't have the clipping problem.