Jason
This week I’ve been working on mission 2 (now in playtesters hands). I’ve worked with Victor on fleshing out some of the gameplay design as well as implementing some more optimized versions of some of the assets. Turns out several of our assets needed a reduction in the number of material slots, so those are now in with more on the way to hopefully result in a smoother experience for everyone. I also managed to wrap up all the pre-production work on the 3rd mission level and am currently doing a bit of R&D for mission 4 as I start planning that out. As always here’s a screenshot of day 2 in mission 2 (work in progress) showing a sandstorm.
Victor
This week has been about polishing up and adding new gameplay elements to Day One of Vacancy. Will be out to testers shortly. Also ran into a random engine bug that had no real information attached to it and it took some digging to fix, so quite a bit of time was wasted on that.
Color Memorization Mini Game:
https://gyazo.com/228addc6b060334c099b7f8fe859fd15
Alex
Been a while since I’ve done an update here! The last two weeks I have been working on cleaning up the materials on a lot of the older character assets we have been using, with the goal of bringing down the draw calls on stuff that might be happening en-masse on screen (ie the zombies). We’ve learned a lot about the Unreal 4 workflow during the development of Contagion VR, particularly with when it comes to performance. So many of the original models/materials/etc were set up pretty poorly in that regard, so this cleanup effort will likely mean more higher/ more stable FPS across the board.
I’ve also been working on creating unique destructible meshes for all our melee weapons. In the past, only a couple of the weapons had bespoke broken versions to use, and everything else was, regrettably, using the baseball bat. That will no longer be the case! Check out the preview video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aieIfXwQbno
Brian
This week I have been focusing on the audio for the riot boss, and Vacancy level. With all the new interactable objects introduced in this upcoming campaign, there is certainly no shortage of audio work needing to be done! As well as the new sfx work being undertaken, we have also been working with the WWISE team to fix some reliability issues we have discovered in the API.. but as we caught it before this new content goes live, we can get it resolved properly with no hacky workarounds.
Lawrence & Paul
This week we have been going pedal to the metal on getting the second part of the Vacancy campaign ready for testers. From boss fights, to runners, to wave defense segments, to rescuing bands of survivors, there is a load of new content included that needs to be coded and dialled in to make this experience all it can be, and an absolute ton of animation work to bring it all to life. That being said, I believe this is a real change from the existing campaign and should be exciting to experience!