As the project entered its last weeks of development, I decided to shift my focus onto making sure the rest of the team's assets were properly implemented, and generally polishing the game. At this point, there wasn't enough time to try to implement any large or complex features, as they would likely end up unfinished and take time away from polishing.
Player and Enemy Sprites
The first priority was importing all of the finished animation sprites for the player and enemies, and getting their animations properly set up.
Waterfall and Foliage
Myself and the animation students on the team both agreed that the forest area felt a bit empty and needed more 'life' to it. Two of the animators spent some time making some foliage textures to add to the environment.
I took these and implemented with some procedural grass on the landscape material. It took a bit of work to make sure the grass foliage blended nicely with the landscape textures and lighting. To achieve the final look I followed some very useful tutorials from the youtube channel PrismaticaDev:
I also worked on a proper material for the waterfall in the forest clearing:
I combined what I was able to create myself (the main water-flow) with some foam and ripple effects from the "Dreamscape Nature: Meadows" asset pack.
Lock Chains
Due to some miscommunication with the animators, the locks were included in the enemy's animation sprites themselves, which made it difficult to distinguish to indicate which enemies had a lock or if their lock was broken etc.
I worked around this by creating a new particle effect of some floating chains, that would surround enemies whose locks could be broken. It's still not as visually clear as I would like, but I unfortunately didn't have the time to fix this.
Collectable Items
One of our 3D artists put together a collectable item model based on one of my concept sketches, the "Wolf Carving" idea.
When I imported the model into the game however, I found that against the natural colours of the environment it was usually quite easy to miss the wolf-carvings in the level. To help them stand out more, I created a simple glowing particle effect.
There also currently wasn't any way to track how many carvings the player had collected, so I put together a simple UI widget that would appear in the top-right corner of the screen.
Other collectable items I added included a small health-pickup, as well as an item that would unlock Wolf-Abilities:
I had to make some adjustments to the UI Faolan provided for the wolf abilities, mainly to make sure it was integrated with the blueprints for unlocking and selecting them. I ended up making the small addition of displaying the associated number keys on each ability icon, to make it clearer to the player how to select them.
Blocking Rework
Some feedback we received in an earlier playtesting session was that blocking tended to feel awkward and had too much of a delay where the player couldn't move or make any other inputs.
It also in some ways made avoiding enemy attacks almost trivial, as there was no limit to how often the block could be used. In combination with how successful blocks would build up the player's energy meter, it encouraged players to stand still and repeatedly block attacks rather than be more aggressive in combat.
To see if I could find a better alternative, I prototyped another version of the block ability.
Instead of committing to a block animation, the player can enter a guard stance while holding the block input down. They will exit this stance as soon as the input is released, giving them full control over the timing.
However, with each hit the player blocks, the guard stance's "health" is reduced. If it takes enough hits, the player's guard will eventually be broken, preventing them from using it again for 6 seconds. The player will also be put into a hitstun state, potentially opening them up to taking a lot of damage. The guard's health will also slowly regenerate after not being used for a short duration.
The aim is to encourage the player to be more careful about when they decide to block attacks, and not rely on it too much.
The idea was mostly inspired by the shield mechanic from the Super Smash Bros series.
Tutorial Pop-ups
A slightly last minute addition I made was the inclusion of a few tutorial pop-ups. While we had originally planned on reworking a large amount of the level to properly introduce each mechanic, for a number of reasons this just didn't end up happening.
With the little time I had left, I added the pop-ups mainly to provide the different button inputs the player needed to know about for different mechanics, since they weren't mentioned anywhere else.
I don't think this implementation is ideal, since there's often other things going on when the pop-ups appear that might distract the player from reading them. With more time I would have probably set them up to only disappear once the player correctly performs the abilities described.
Reflection
Looking back at how the project went, I think I'm happy with the individual pieces of work I produced. I definitely feel like I've learned a lot and improved my skills in scripting and technical design. However, in a lot of ways I don't think the project really came together in the end as I would’ve liked.
In its current state, the game's narrative feels unfinished and missing large pieces. We never got a chance to introduce characters like Yin, explain plot elements like The Huntsmen or what's going on with the Night World. Certain sections of the level still feel empty and lack proper models / materials, and it's overall very short. In terms of gameplay systems, there were quite a few things that, while finished, didn't make it into the game's submitted demo.
There's a lot of reasons for this, some of which were outside of the team's control like certain members disappearing or not contributing past a certain point. I do think there are a good few things I could've done better myself though.
For starters, I set the scope of the project far too big, committing to too many ideas early on like the boss-fight, an upgrade system, complex combat etc. Since the assignment was to create a game with a narrative focus, I think it would've been better to keep the gameplay ideas simpler. By taking on as many complex systems as I did (some of which had little visible impact in the end), I couldn't be as flexible to work on areas that were getting left behind like Level Design.
I think the whole team largely struggled with communication at times, including myself. We could've all done a better job at keeping each other up-to-date on progress outside of our weekly meetings, especially when many team members wouldn't be present. I also got into the habit of taking on most of the scripting work by myself, and not communicating about it enough. In this way, I don't think I quite fulfilled the management responsibility of the Lead Programmer role.
Again though, I definitely feel like I've learned a lot and improved as a developer from this project, and hopefully in any future ones I can learn from these mistakes.