[DEV] Final Stretches + overview
For the final hours of the project, finetuning the multiplayer, and polishing it took most of my time. Adding more scripts to deal with animations, and a good attempt at syncing the visual appearances of the characters.
Rewriting a lot of code to get the single player up and running. For future development the kanji drawing and multiplayer components should be much farther apart.
Overview of my contributions
- Kanji VG pre-processor
A system to convert kanji in svg format to directional components. - Kanji Writer
A system that easily writes kanji with mouse or finger. - Kanji Database manager
Easily manage all those kanji, from anywhere in the project. - Kanji Writer Manager
An event based system to easily compare user input with the Kanji Database. - Multiplayer
A gamemode for 2 players to face each other in battle.
[DEV] Multiplayer + player management
Working further on the multiplayer, also adding base support for playfab integration, to handle logins etc.
[ART] Polishing Art Side of the Game
I keep polishing our game week after week. Klausi and Wouter were helping me with polishing the City Map. I re-arranged the City Map again, but in a last minute me and Klausi decided to make some changes on our City Map. We wanted to have different “teleport” spots on our City Map which will transfer the player from the City Map (kind of menu) to a new location (modes of the game). Each location (mode) is represented by a specific asset on City Map. We decided to divide the Writing Mode into Single- and Multi-player Modes, and as a result we gonna make a separate spot on City Map which will represent a single player of Writing Mode.
Also we want to have an access to Characters’ Customization menu from the City Map, so I re-used assets Phuong created to make a new asset for a spot on the map, it’s a clothes shop. Later it will be added to the City Map.
For a Single-player Writing Mode we want to have a new scene, it’s a training room which is accessible from the Pagoda on City Map. I created a new environment for this scene, also a model of the canvas, all of these models are unwrapped, but still need to be textured.
[Art] Environment Update of last 2 weeks
I didn’t write blog last week so this weel i will update everything i did during 2 weeks.
First of all, the market_ writing scene:
- Mountain background + tiling ground texture
- modeled second house ( to make the scene less repeatable)
- textured both houses + all market’s assets
- made prefabs for some market’s assets and houses ( after added point lights for lanterns)
Secondly, i modeled tree and added them the classroom_reading scene. However, after pulling, they’re gone. I couldn’t take screenshots. As for texture of classroom, i did update but only little bit. I will try to finish it next week.
Finally, the city map is way to lit so i removed directional light and added many point lights. Half of 3d buildings in the scene including Tokyo Tower, school and shop houses , i decided to turn them all into 2d assets (painted on 3d base) . For the rest, i will finish next week.
[DEV] Bugs and other vermin
For this week I’ve focussed on fixing the bugs that came to our attention during the building of last weeks self induced false alarm, mainly regarding the reading and cityscene.
-new navmesh for the cityscene
-new model for the cityscene with more animations
-improved cameramovement in the readingscene
-fixing ui-scaling error in readingscene
[ART] Art stuff going on here
My part of a job was to continue working on scenes, their layouts and lighting. Also I took participation in work on the UI for Main Menu, City Map and Reading Game, so UI fits more in the style of our game. I also decided to give some final touches to the characters’ textures, so I updated them a bit.
Updated Characters’ textures
Main Menu (WIP)
City Map
‘Learn to write’ game screen
‘Learn to read’ game screen
Reading Game updated UI
[ART] Skinning of every outfit part
This week I did the skinning of every outfit part for our characters. I underestimated how much work it would be to weight paint three pairs of robes and pants for every character. I still need to adjust the skinning of the skirts to make it look “skirtier” and of some robes, because those that are close to the skin sometimes intersect with the shoulders.
I already imported the updated characters fbx to Unity and assigned the textures. I adjusted the materials and applied a shader to them that uses a emission texture as well as a diffuse texture to have a brighter look.
[Dev] Kanji Writer
Will this ever end!?
Working on the kanji recognizer to be a smooth experience was my main goal for this week, making it a intuitive. This system works really well, but it’s not super clean when taking a look on the code inside.
This system also has some detection on how accurate the kanji was.
[DEV] Introduction to Networking
This week I dove into the world of networking. Since I have quite some experience with Unity’s implementation of networking, I was able to get quite some results. Playfab makes it easy to login from any portal, and easy to track user statistics and store custom data to fit the needs. This can both be used for storing player customization, but also remembering how well the player preformed in certain difficulties of the game. Combining the cloud code of playfab with the matchmaking of photon a worthy opponent can be found.
Photon also handles most of the networking traffic. After some testing, I was able to interact with people from the other side of the planet, without much delay.
More on this next week, the school network is causing quite an issue though, since we can’t communicate to the servers that set up the matches.