Planet Nine Dev Log Week 5
By Jake Stephens
This week was big in terms of development for the game. We were fortunate enough to have a couple of our developers attend a networking event called “Pizza & Pixels”. Whilst they were there, they showed off a build of the game to some professionals and others who attended. We got some really good feedback on the game from these guys and will implement what we can in the following weeks.
Development this week has gone quite smoothly compared to last week, so that is always a bonus. However with that said, let’s have a look at what our team has been working on this week.
Programming:
Ronan was working on getting his toxin particle up & running the way it is intended to. Although he did get it working last week, there were some minor bugs that he has since ironed out. He has now integrated that particle effect into the first level and it looks amazing. There may need to be some tweaks to it, but for now it works and will be polished later on. He also did his first “lighting pass” for the level, ensuring that the lighting looked as good as possible and was working as intended. This was so that when we showed the build at the networking event that game looked as nice as it possibly could.
Marcus has been focused on setting up the Data logs in the UI as well as in the world space. He has made it so that the Data logs are now able to be picked up and unlocked in the level and Data Log menu. He also created a typewriter effect, that will print the text on screen in a sequence when reading the log in the menu . Marcus also began working on creating the laser blueprint as well.
Surprise… Noah has continued work on his conveyor belts and has made it so that they are now UV scaled. They are still pretty buggy with object interaction, but Noah is currently working on a fix and should be fixed by next week. Other than that, Noah has also been refining his “Save/Load” system for the game which for now,
For Charlie this week, he was mainly focused on squashing bugs that were found in our play tests. He also did some playtesting of the build himself. He found some bugs and then squashed them. He also worked on polishing everything he has created over the last couple weeks to ensure that it all works as smoothly as possible.
Design:
Based upon feedback from our initial playtests, Dan has been hard at work implementing that feedback into the tutorial level. He also began concepting the next level within the game which will be factory based. He created a top down design and sent through some concepts for the level for feedback.
Will just like last week has been working tirelessly on the sound design for the game. He has sourced/created even more sounds to use and even started to mix some and put them in the engine for testing. He also got a build ready to take to Pizza & Pixels, to show off and get some feedback on.
For myself it was a relatively slow week. I continued my work on concepting the first & seconds puzzles for the game, evolving the puzzles to a point where they were playable. I cannot test how it works with the light detection, because whenever the detection manager is in any scene on my PC, when I try to play in editor Unreal crashes and I have to restart the application. So for now I have been testing without knowing how the darkness will affect me in the rooms. However this is only a temporary fix and will need to be rectified sooner rather than later.
Art:
Connor has been smashing through the level blockout for the first level that he began working on last week. He also started to work within Unreal to use the modular assets he created to help make the level feel more like an abandoned space station. He implemented his wall & roof assets in and started using them throughout the scene
Petra was working within Connor’s scene this week. She created some modular assets as well that will be used for set dressing within the level. She also kept working on creating proper versions of the assets that she blocked out in prior weeks. She also continued work on texturing the gloves and asked for more feedback about the colour schemes.
This week Kye has been focused on iterating on his flora assets that he has created, as well as creating new ones to use within the levels. He also has been working on a new and improved generator model that will be finished by next week and will replace the existing ones scattered throughout the level.
Lachlan did some work on his flora assets as well. He sculpted some new assets and made refinements to some others. He also kept working on the background image, making that look even better than it already does and worked on some more UI concepts.
Anyway that’s all for this week folks, thankyou for checking out the dev log, we will be back next week to show you the progress we have made. You can check out the previous week’s dev logs on my Medium page which is linked here.
You can also check the game out for yourself here.
