Weekly State of the Repo

We’re in Vertical Slice! We’re not totally sure, but we think we may have been the first team in all the Capstone sections to reach this stage, although a few others have done so since Monday. It is, of course, not a competition–but it’s still nice to feel a little ahead.

We’ve also settled on a new name for the game, since Modulate wasn’t working for everyone. The new name is…

This week felt like a slower one, partially because Charlie and I both worked 9 hours at one of Champlain’s Open Houses on Saturday and so our work capacity was significantly reduced, not to mention a lot of us are hitting a crunch time for some of our other classes. Still, we managed to accomplish some pretty significant things this week, as well as attending QA twice. You can see a full, four player, four-minute game of re[Mod] here:

Stage Areas

The big feature that went in this week–although it was underutilized in the match demonstrated above–is capture stage areas. These are areas of the map that players can stand in and capture (as long as no other players are present) to collect a legendary weapon part. These parts are significantly better than those found in crates, and can allow the player to dominate the battle field.

The primary issues with stages right now are with design; players are not encouraged enough to seek out these stages and the legendary parts that they grant. That is something we will definitely tweak going forward, likely through early polish-esque items like lighting and effects.

Audio System

At the end of my last post, I mentioned that we were investigating possible third-party, middleware audio engines for our project to improve the quality and ease of use of audio. I’m happy to say that we decided on FMOD, and as of this week it is fully implemented with our project and the videos above use FMOD for their sound. This is going to allow the design team to have significantly more control over how the game sounds without much programming support.

Miscellaneous

The other time spent on re[Mod] this week, for me at least, involved making weapon parts disappear after a certain amount of time, so that by the end of the four minute match there weren’t hundreds of unwanted parts scattered around the arena. This had a significant impact on our QA responses; players seemed to understand and enjoy what was happening much more without all of that clutter.

I’ve also spent a lot of time this week on outside things, like updating my resume and my LinkedIn, trying to get ready for the coming months full of applications and reaching out to people. Expect an overhaul of my website soon to reflect a new style of personal branding that I’m going for!