Spike's Digital Media Blog

 Lots and lots of progress today. Primarily it was working to get the enemy functioning with assistance from Josh, so now it freezes when shone on by the flashlight and chases the player when it is not, because it is temperamental still, I shall go with the decision to add walls that only the player can climb so the navmesh which defines the explorable area for the enemy is smaller and I will have the same enemy duplicated 3 times and separated into their own separate section of the level.  but I also started adding trees to my level, invisible walls and also refining the mountain terrain. I also tried adding a translucent yellow cylinder for the checkpoint asset but as usual it crashed the editor. Big whoop dee doo surprise... After rebooting, it worked and there is now a functioning checkpoint system. Because of how we set up the checkpoints as objects the player teleports to, they can be easily adjusted in regards to game balance or if we decide to change the level.

  22/11/2023 Today I added menus and an actual model for the batteries, courtesy of Jimmy, which now functions properly as well as a pause menu. UNFORTUNATELY, Github didn't upload the changes when I pushed them and I lost a days progress, lovely... 27/11/2023 Today, I added menus again and also started clearing up the landscape, making it more even for the purposes of placing objects, the menus now all function within the game and I also added a 'Goal' object from an actor that when the player collides with it, it sends the player to a 'Thanks for Playing' Screen. On a personal note, I'm a little concerned with Jimmy and Mo's work progress, but only one of us can really code the game because of Github's utter uselessness but they don't really seem omotivated to do ANYTHING for the project, which honestly I expected with them having a break every 5minutes but it is what it is. I'm also losing the will to live over Unreal crashing the entire PC ev

  There has been lots of progress today as you can see from the screenshot, I have added a clock to the Home Page after my dad told me he liked having a physical clock on his phone which is easier to read than the one that is always on screen on Android/ Apple due to his poor Reading vision, aside from that, i added functionality to the settings with sliders and pop-ups which will take you out of the app to go to the app store for a review and Feedback which will take you to your Phone's default email app. I also refined the calendar page by adding more details and showing where interactive buttons would go to navigate between dates and show events on the selected date. Here is both states of the animated slider button

  Today in Figma, I slightly tweaked the whole visual aesthetic of the prototype to use light blue textfields instead blank white as it merges better with the neumorphic style, I also animated the seconds on the in-app timer/ clock (A bit of skeuomorphic design for you there.) but found out due to the 10000ms Animation length limit, making the hour and minute hands move would literally take thousands of pages worth of animation, so I limited the movement just to seconds for prototyping purposes. There is also a digital version of the clock displayed and when you tap on the bar for an alarm, a countdown screen will come up for the user too. Here you can also see the aforementioned tag feature where the user will be able to assign hashtags and colours to dates in order for them to be more easily organised within the app, if you specifically cannot remember the title for the alert. Next I will probably work on adding content to empty pages and adding a countdown prototype.

09/11/2023: Today my tutor shared all the email addresses of my group, I quickly set-up a discord group and emailed everybody the link as well as organizing the server as Moderator and set-up roles for each university, we introduced ourselves to each other and began discussing our initial ideas, I also created a google slide for people to place their Moodboards and inspiration as well as initial sketches. 10-11/11/2023 We discussed ideas and added to Slides  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VFXPX1aawmpge9fnM8cXgHhLwmy5aJIQLjPZp2k1whw/edit?usp=sharing 13/11/2023 We finalised the ideas from our slides and decided to go with the 'reflection' idea as mentioned in the Slides. We also figured out how we will divide the workload. The 3 from TOA will do the main illustration, GAF and I will do the text/ interactive elements. 14/11/2023 We in fact did not finalise ideas yesterday and after TOA got feedback from one of their tutors, the 3 of them (and for some reason their tutor)

8/11/2023   Today we continued making models for the Game, the Shipping container and the monster have began development and the landscape has finally been placed. We also found an issue related to movement where the inputs would unassign thermselves after a close or a crash so we exported the input settings as a file that can be easily reuploaded into the project. I also aligned the light from the player with the torch and removed the placeholder model for the player. 15/11/2023 This image summarises the entire work session which I did today. I moved the project to the D drive so it will crash less but it still crashes a fair amount because the university refuses to update the drivers for the graphics cards on the PCs, other than that absolute roadblock I added the basic floor terrain minus a majority of the objects bar the fences and a battery. From now we need more objects which will hopefully be added to the editor next week and maybe the others can start adding their objects too..

 Today, I updated my Logo yet again to give the 'D' a more rounded feel, to match the '2' on the other half of the logo. This shall hopefully be the Logo's Final Iteration for a while. On my App itself I also began experimenting with a Neumorphist style for the UI elements, which is an off-shoot of regular minimalism which uses contrast, highlight and shadows to create an almost 3d effect to interactive elements. This looks much more appealing than my previous UI design which can be seen in previous blogs looking rather flat in comparison.

  Today we got character movement added into the test level and the Flashlight mechanic, we also started making a battery model for the level to use in conjunction with the flashlight mechanic. Also Nyssa made this car model today and is about to texture it. it is a very goood model and similarly aligns with our Artstyle. For some reason Mo decided to add crouching animations to a test model which we're going to delete anyway which wasted at least an hour and a half, probably more of time with Josh. But other than that it was fairly productive.  The collaboration with Mo for adding movement code to our project has left the content drawer a little messy so that will need to be cleaned.