CAGD 377 Blog Post 6

4/27/2025

Sprint 6 Kickoff

Hello everyone, my name is Angel Suazo and welcome back to my blog. In today's blog post I will be covering my work that I accomplished this Sprint as well as once again how our Sprint 6 went for our team. I am also excited to share that for this sprint we had our official Beta test for our projects Beta version in class. Let's dive into how this Sprint went for us as well as how our Beta playtest turned out. 

Work

For this sprint I decided to focus on a couple of small but very crucial things. To start off, the last sprint we had to face some minor setbacks that required us to go back to the drawing board and start fresh. With that being said, I decided to take it upon myself as the Lead Designer to go back and design our own Level Icons and our own D-pad button. To do this I went into Photoshop and created those 2 things so that we could have them as our own assets. After doing so, it was crucial for me to go back into our games unity project and incorporate them into our previous setup. Even though these needed to be redone some good things came out of it. 

Our new D-pad buttons would now provide visual feedback. Unlike before where the players would simply press it, now the buttons actually get highlighted to indicate you just pressed this button which I personally think is cool. As for the Level Icon it was beneficial to also get these done since we had previously only put in some placeholder images in for them, so it ended up working out as well with those. 

Another thing I worked on this sprint that had to be redone was our audio. We used to have an audio play whenever our player pressed a button to provide noise feedback as well. Well, we also wanted to create our own asset for this so I once again took it upon myself to record a new brick laying sound and turn that into an mp3 file so that we could use it for our game. I still have some refining to do for this since I used my phone to record the sound, it ended up picking up a lot of the background noise that we do not want in the sound file. This was actually a cool first experience however since I have never worked with audio before.

The last thing I ended up doing for this sprint was reworking a little bit of how our stun mechanic for our star projectile works. We had received some feedback from our last playtest that players were still a bit confused on how the stun actually worked. I decided to add a blinking effect whenever the player enters the stun state so that it emphasizes to the player “I cannot move because I am stunned” and hopefully it clears up some confusion.

Playtest

As for the playtest we had this sprint, it went amazing. We had a total of 14 play testers play test our game and ultimately, we had such a good turnout. We believe our game has come a long way and we are dedicated to creating a high-quality game. With that being said, this sprint’s playtest was aimed at finding any big or minor game breaking bugs inside of our game and because of that we now have valuable feedback that will allow us to fix those bugs. 

Overall

We as a team are very proud of all our efforts so far that have gone into creating this amazing project. We cannot wait for our game to finally get published and we are so eager and excited to be able to do so.

CAGD 373 Blog Post 3

Sprint 3

04/24/25

Final Group Game Scene Project

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog. Today I will be talking about the work I was able to complete this time around for Sprint 3 of our team's Final Group Game Scene Project. For this sprint I was tasked with a couple of cool things to work on and ultimately, I was able to complete most of them. Let's dive into how this week's sprint worked out for me.

This sprint I started by focusing on our scene’s water mechanics that we intend on having. For the specific town we are recreating there is a river that runs through the side of the town, and we wanted to figure out how we can incorporate some water into our scene. With that being said. I was tasked with researching inside of Unity HDRP how we can render out some water to make a flowing river for our game scene. Ultimately, I was able to get something in the books in the meantime since we do not have a block out or any terrain set up yet but it’s a starting point.

The second thing I focused on this sprint was finishing up the 3D hotel model or what is essentially the 2 top and bottom decks that are in front of the hotel and that lead into the stairs. This is something I wanted to wrap up and finish because I had started the hotel model in Sprint 1 but I did not get around to finishing it.

The last and final thing I was able to complete this sprint was making a reload function and ammo cap to the player's gun. This was important since we are going to be giving our player a classic revolver to use, and we don’t want them shooting more than 6 bullets at a time without reloading first. Thanks for sticking around and I'll see you guys next week.

CAGD 373 Blog Post 2

Sprint 2

04/17/25

Final Group Game Scene Project

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog. Today I will be talking about the work I was able to complete this time around for Sprint 2 of our team's Final Group Game Scene Project. For this sprint I was able to shift gears into my programmer side of my role and tackle creating some cool gun aiming and firing mechanics.

I started by working on our players' gun mechanic since we are thinking of creating some sort of way to interact with our group's game scene with this cool mechanic. I started off by importing our player controller prefab into our scene and then creating a simple gun prefab that I could use to align with our players camera. After that came the hard part of making our gun sit at one position when the player is idling to then making it seem like the player is now aiming with their gun. I was able to do this by simply manipulating the vector3 position of the gun every time the player pressed the right mouse button. While doing this I also wanted to change the players FOV so that they can physically zoom at their targets when they are aiming. I was able to accomplish this by making the camera a public transform in my gun script and then assigning it to our inspector. 

The last and final thing I was able to do this sprint was to create the crosshairs in the middle of the screen so that the player could have a target to aim at. This was a simple Png that I was able to pull and incorporate into our UI. That's it for this sprint, I will see you next week.

CAGD 377 Blog Post 5

4/13/2025

Sprint 5 Kickoff

Hello everyone, my name is Angel Suazo and welcome back to my blog. In today's blog post I will be going over some awesome stuff but first as always, I will be covering my work that I accomplished this Sprint as well as how our Sprint 5 went for our team. I am also excited to share that for this sprint we had our 3rd playtest for our digital prototype in class. Let's take a look at how this sprint went.

Work

For this sprint I decided to focus on 2 very important things and ultimately, I was able to accomplish both of them. The first thing I tackled was creating a newer and updated version of our Menu, which ultimately became our Menu 2.0. This was something I had desperately wanted to revisit in order to try and revamp how our Main Menu looked. I definitely feel that as a team we are at a stage in this project where we need to go back and fill in some sort of placeholder stuff we began and incorporated into our project for us to come back and finish later. So that's exactly what I did, I came back and revisited our Main Menu which definitely needed a newer slick look. After spending some time, I figured how to create an animation play on screen for our Menu and decided that this would be an awesome and unique look to our game’s Main Menu.

The second thing I worked on was updating our floor blocks to better reflect a nicer and unique look to it as well. This is something I wanted to take care of this sprint, especially since in our latest playtest we were receiving multiple play testers feedback in which they said they were unsure which block or blocks the player was standing on. So ultimately, I took it upon myself to create a new mesh that could immediately be used to update the floor block prefab inside our unity project so that we wouldn't have to manually go and replace all of the floor blocks in all 3 of our levels that we have so far. This was super crucial that I do in order to speed up and save time. For the mesh all I did was go to Maya and create a simple 1x1 cube to fit the same dimensions for the prefab that we already had, and I basically just added a bevel to the top face of the cube to better represent the grid lines as shown in the image below. This will definitely clear up any confusion's players might have from now on. 

Playtest

As for the playtest we had this sprint, it went amazing. We had a total of 12 play testers play test our game and ultimately, we had such a good turnout. Everyone seemed to like our newest iterations added into our game and they all enjoyed it. We still had a couple bugs found in our game once again which will need to be looked at closely again. Ultimately however, they all were able to beat the game and experience all that it had to offer. We also have tons of new suggestions from players who are eager to see more from our video game and we can’t wait to hear what they would like to see from our game.

Overall

We are definitely very proud of all our team's efforts and work that has gone into making this project come to life and ultimately, we are excited to finish the semester strong and make our game the best it can be. 

CAGD 373 Blog Post 1

Sprint 1

04/10/25

Final Group Game Scene Project

Hello everyone and welcome to a new post of mine in which I am going to share with you all a new and exciting project I will be working on for the next 5 weeks alongside my group for our Game Asset Production class spring semester class 2025. Our team's name is “The Outlaws” and we have decided to work on recreating an awesome town from the very popular hit game called “Red Dead Redemption 2”. As I mentioned earlier, we will be working as a group for the next couple weeks and tackling work through sprints in an attempt to accomplish our deadline goal for our Final. The town we have decided to recreate is called the town of Strawberry. 

With all that being said, Last week was our official Sprint 1 kickoff in which we got to get work assigned and rolls given. For this project I will be taking on the role of Modeler as well as Programmer. Since we are just starting off however, I will mainly be doing 3D modeling work until we have a bit more to work with. 

As for the work I accomplished this week, I was assigned with digitally modeling the Trackers Hotel which sits on the main entrance road of Strawberry. I had a good reference image to work off of and I was able to accomplish almost all of it. Once I modeled, I moved onto creating my UVs in order to fully complete my models and hand them off to our team's Texture Artist. That pretty much sums up this post, but I can't wait to catch you guys up next week