Team Progress
Our team held a meeting this week where we discussed what we would be working on for the rest of the week. The rest of the week, we worked on creating sprites for additional enemies, adding in the confirmed body mods, finishing the footstep and ambient sounds, creating the intensity ramp using the setups we came up with last week and new setups (order of introducing the setups), and other tasks discussed in the meeting.
Individual Contributions
This week, I finished the footstep sounds for our player character. Based on the shortlist I created, I picked an existing pair of footsteps (two separate audio clips) that I felt fit our game aesthetic. For each footstep, I applied the following effects in the order listed: 1. Ableton Chorus, to create a fuller sound; 2. Ableton Saturator, to warm up the sound; 3. Waves Maserati VX1, to add EQ, compression and reverb (spatial echo); and 4. Ableton Compressor, to reduce any transients (sudden peaks) in the sound. After adding the effects, I froze and flattened each audio clip, which created a copy of each audio clip with the effects built-in, before exporting each audio clip.
The footstep sound for our player character.
As well, I worked on the ambient background music for our game. Using the examples I chose from soundimage.org, I began creating tracks/loops that would match the example tracks/loops and fit our game aesthetic using the sounds I previously created and some newly created sounds. These tracks and loops will be further worked on the following week.
In addition, I worked on creating the intensity ramp using the setups we came up with last week and new setups. Currently, I have created a list of the setups we will potentially use for our game and labelled each setup with a letter for identification purposes. Next week, I will continue working on creating the intensity ramp using the list of labelled setups.
Reflection
One issue we ran into was the physics when the player character walks through a door while holding a box. When this happens, the physics script of the player holding a box remains active, making it seem like they are still holding on to the box. once the player drops the "box", the physics reset to normal. This occurs because the physics of the player holding a box is attached to the player and the box does not travel through the door. To solve this, which can potentially be done next week, we can either reset all physics scripts to the defaults or allow boxes to travel through doors.
Another issue we ran into was the player getting stuck on a wall/platform if the grappling hook latched onto another wall/platform on the other side of that wall/platform as the player was falling. This results in the grappling hook going through the wall/platform and the player trying to be pulled through the wall/platform but getting stuck. The current solution we are using is allowing the user to cancel the grappling hook at any time. Potential solutions we can try if we have time include having the grappling gook deactivate if it would cross a wall/platform or having the grappling hook bend around the walls/platforms and have the player follow accordingly.