The Exodus
EXODUS is the second and final development team of the Entertainment Technology Center’s first Yearlong Game Project. In Spring 2019, the first team created high-level game design and technical documentation for a single-player survival game with real-time strategy elements called The Exodus. The player should strategically move their survivor’s home base, send survivors to gather and refine resources, and develop a plan to rescue more survivors. Along with a prototype, the first team laid groundwork for art assets and level designs. Team EXODUS is implementing, playtesting, iterating, and balancing this documentation to completion. Our team will also refine the unique artistic vision left last Spring and publish the game to a digital distribution platform.
Roles: Level Designer, Game Designer Team: 5 Members Engine: Unity
Final Build
For this week’s build, Keran and Varun were able to add in the inner fortress character animations. Namely, the animations that take place while characters work inside the compartments. We are also experimenting with rotating lights that help make the compartments come “alive” while the Survivor works inside.
We’ve rewritten most of the warnings that the player may receive during gameplay. These are intended to be for both information and world-building, hopefully making them more player-friendly messages that read less like debug logs and more
conversational. For example, when a player overworks Julian, rather than saying “Julian died of low energy!” the error reads as “Julian has died of exhaustion…”
We found some free Substance Share textures as placeholders in case we can’t get to original textures by the end of the semester. With the free Substance Painter plugin for Unity, we can easily import new materials for the HD Render Pipeline. The actual .sbsar files were crashing our Builds though, so Varun just extracts the meta date from the file itself to create a new Unity material of the same high definition visual quality!
Healthy and Hongzhu have completed the 20 unique characters with their new portraits on the Character Build panel. There’s a ton of diversity in the characters, so Healthy chose 20 combinations that show off all of her pieces and colors.
A handful of playtesters had told us that the minimap alone was not going to help them orient in the map, so we implemented a yellow arrow that points in the direction of the camera at all times. It is only visible while viewing the mini-map, and we are already seeing promising results!
Healthy has started working on the opening cinematic videos.
To automate our itch.io upload process, Hongzhu implemented an additional tool onto Jenkins that allows us to post to itch.io straight from the Jenkins browser itself. This will help speed up minor Production tasks in the future.
Week 12 Build
This week, more UI work was done by Hongzhu and Julian, such as the first pass on the new character panel, available for viewing in next week’s build.
By the end of this week, Varun plans to get runtime terrain deformation implemented, which we believe will help sell the weight of the Fortress as it pushes sand away with every step. If possible, he would also like to
The blue smoke for minimap guidance is buggy in builds, but
here’s a look at what it should be if everything was going according to plan.
Our Level Editor now has an Erase button! Previously, Julian was using the river tool to delete models, and even then sometimes it never worked. Thanks, Varun!
Healthy cranked this week and provided us with plenty of character model headshots to choose from!
Hongzhu implemented the new character panels with their headshots that change dynamically based on the Survivor’s energy status.
Healthy is working on the opening video’s screenshots, we plan to have this intro cutscene implemented before Festival!
Week 11 Build
Hongzhu has laid down the groundwork for Survivors to now load three descriptions that dynamically change for them based on their Status bar.
New resource models for Fuel and Rations have been implemented, and Keran was kind enough to retexture these first so they would communicate more fluidly in Unity’s HD render pipeline.
Based on player feedback from last Saturday, the level’s tornado
placement and a lot of resources have been moved around, for better playability.
A new Mini-Map first pass has been implemented for HDRP! From early playtests, players now want an arrow of sorts to help in orienting the camera and player’s facing direction. This has been implemented since then!
For our internal playtest builds, Varun has added a debug panel, so we can more rapidly find breaks in the gameplay. This is already saving the two programmers time when it comes to debugging new features.
Fog of War has been reinstated with HDRP! Varun imagines a wave-like fog for Galilei-9E.
Week 10 Build
This week, we made some big decisions in terms of our art and UI design. As a team, we’ve decided to start shifting gears to the artistic direction, and thus, design is slowly grinding to a halt. With only so much time left in the semester, we have decided as a team to switch gears to making our game look good! And with that, check out our build for this week. Soon to come is new UI design for building compartments, viewable in next week’s build!
The groundwork has been laid for Characters to be loaded on a per-model basis. We will load them in a list in a .JSON file, and
each model’s hair and textures can be decided by us based on the sad character’s descriptions.
Hongzhu has implemented a spot for sad descriptions, and Julian is working on three descriptions which will change dynamically based on the character’s current status.
New UI icons for Steel, Food, and Survivors have been made in order to better fit the overall UI design that Hongzhu and Julian have been working on.
On Saturday, we had Playtest Day where we were able to iron out lots of kinks in the Build Feature.
We got new Alien Terrain models which we believe will really help us flesh out the environments so our artists can focus on finishing the Survivors and their animations.
And finally, Hongzhu implemented an actual sun in the level with realtime shadows that help convey the passing of time to players.
Week 9 Build
Now, survivors have some more UI interaction when a player hovers over them. When survivors arrive at a resource and the player hovers over the resource, they can see which survivors are there and what their “Energy” status is.
We’ve also added in some more mouse interactions for gameplay, so now the camera rotates on both the “A” and “D” keys, as well as when a player holds the middle mouse button and drags the mouse either left or right. I know a handful of consistent playtesters that will be ecstatic with this new feature!
On the backend, we are putting more time into the level editor. With a new “alien foliage” asset pack purchased, it’s time to allow the editor to drop these big beautiful assets into the levels. Our artists are working out a pipeline to upgrade the textures we received in the pack for the HD Render Pipeline in Unity, and Hongzhu and Varun are cranking hard on the Environment’s Fog and Tornado shaders.
Week 8 Build
We implemented a new version of the Character panel that now displays the selected Survivor’s name, Energy status (Determined, Okay, and Tired), and the ability to send said Survivor to the selected resource. On the back end, we fully upgraded to Unity 2019.2 and got a new HDRI skybox implemented. The Fog of War still needs more work, but that will start looking good soon!
Healthy and Keran made big leaps on the Fortress as a whole, finishing the outer walls of the Fortress completely. Some work
still remains inside the Fortress, but it’s just texturing, as the inner models are done and placed in the correct spots already. Healthy also began modeling new versions of the Survivors, so more updates on that are to come.
As for when Survivors are sent to a resource, we wanted a more visual representation of the amount of time left to complete work on the resource, so we implemented an orange “Timer” bar that depletes as Survivors work at the hex tile. We also implemented the resource names onto the top UI bar for players to better connect two and two together.
Week 7 Build
After playtesting last week, we decided to test the Tornado’s functionality this week in our playtesting build. For now, it is surprising players. Its functionality is quite bare but players seem excited to play with the tornado, and Varun is excited to keep improving the gameplay features of this environmental hazard. The level now has new rules that prevent the player from moving the Fortress up to many tiles at once, sending survivors down too many tiles at once, and new “Water” tiles that prevent the player from sending Survivors to deep water tiles, though the Fortress can go down onto these tiles.
We also implemented “Play” and “Pause” buttons for players to be able to better control the day’s timer. Initial playtest results have complimented this new feature, though some players seem to forget the function is there altogether, so some more iteration on this feature will attempt to make it a more easily accessible button.
On the Art implementation side, Healthy is cleaning up the final UVs for the inner Fortress models, and Keran is working to help Healthy finish up these art assets so she can model a new oil plant she got excited about in the art documentation. More on this next week!
The next bit of gameplay that is to be implemented is the Survivor’s energy bars, which prevents the player from sending the same Survivor over and over, and adds another layer of resource management to the gameplay. This Energy will add another dimension of humanity to our characters, as they will go from states like “Determined” to “Tired” as they do excessive amounts of work. Feeding a Survivor will also boost their Energy meter, though we are not sure if allowing the player to decide who eats is within the scope of the project…
Next week is also halves, so as a team we discussed whether we should show a live demo of our game or not. We have decided against this since most of the work up to this point has been on the back end, and most of the art assets are not implemented in a way that most of the team would feel happy to present yet. Thus, we have decided to record snippets of gameplay that we feel can present our work in an interesting way that properly conveys the amount of blood, sweat, and tears (of joy) we are putting into the game.