Updates for Week Sept 18

This week we completed our Team formation and the second Game Jam on Saturday. The main update here is related to our Game Jam development.

Progress

- Narrowed down the core game mechanic: re-arranging objects in the attic to make the room look like the one in the tape, which will trigger changes to the video that the tape is playing.

- Tried a mock role delegation among our teammates for the first time. 

- Implemented a short demo for our game. The main task is to find the vase in the room which seems to be broken in the video.

- Design assets and music clips were integrated successfully.

- Had another team meeting on Sunday (Sept 24) to discuss role delegation for this semester based on our experience with the Game Jam on Saturday. Also assigned tasks for each team member for the next milestone: game pitch & design brief.

Challenges

- For our mock role delegation during the second Game Jam, overall it worked fine but when integrating things together in Unity, sometimes we had merge conflicts with Unity scenes, and CS students were overwhelmed near the end. Hence, we had a meeting on Sunday (Sept 24) to further discuss  the task assignment. The roles for design and music students almost remain the same, and for CS students, we are going to have different people working on controlling the tapes, moving and picking up items, as well as layout implementation & sensitivity tweaking.

- CS students had different problems with the Unity Editor during the Game Jam, but the problem was solved later.

- We faced problems with how exactly we should design the mechanic of the interaction with the tapes, so after the Game Jam some of our teammates discussed the problem with the professor and we further discussed it on Sunday. Now we decided the core game mechanic to be the one outlined in the Progress Section.

Setbacks

- Due to time limitations, there are some features not implemented yet in our Game Jam demo. Namely, now the player can only pick up and drop down objects, but the rigger for the video is not implemented yet. Also, now the player is able to move but we haven't added the player's hand models to Unity yet (although the design students already finished the model). We also haven't added animations of the player interacting with the objects (e.g. opening the box). Interactions with the tape were also not implemented. We will try to have a more complete demo next week.