Week 10

This week I continued work on designing and constructing the buildings in the scene. I worked a total of 5 hours this week on the project. After doing a rough sketch of each building I got to work on a solar panel array for one of the science structures. Next week I'll be continuing to work on the buildings for the game.

Below are some screenshots of the solar panels.

Week 9

This week I started work on the first building for the game. The scavenging hut is the building for the stealth class within the game. This building is designed to be the most dilapidated in the game, showing the scavenger's nature of combining parts from different places to create something. I ran into a problem setting up ID maps to texture the building because of the number of unique objects for this structure but I'll finish working through it and have this textured early in the week. The upcoming week will be used to create more buildings for the game.

Week 7

I decided to make a change this week and postpone the game design aspect of things for a while and transition into the visuals and underlying systems in Unreal. Setting up resource management in Unreal will make playtesting much easier, and since the basics of the game are done I can start work on the three classes within the game and all of the structures I'll need to create. This also gives me more time in my game design class to learn about constructing a balanced and fun game.

About 5 hours of work total on the week.

Week 6

This week I really jumped in to playtesting the game. I've already been able to make some balance changes to help things run more smoothly. Other than these changes, the biggest thing that became clear is that the game can't be replicated with pen and paper due to mechanics like fog of war and stealth. Because of this I plan to move to Unreal to get the game working at a low level for future playtests. The first system I'm going to create will manage resources for players, adding income to their pool and subtracting for purchases as needed. The second system will be a "God Mode" for the game allowing abilities to be used during runtime.

The other progress I made was to settle on a theme for the game and create the first class character. The theme is going to be a post-apocalyptic society. The premise of this society is that many regions existed under one ruling power. Each region contributed to society in come specialized way such as technology production, research, manufacturing, or farming. Civil war caused the system to collapse and each region was left to fend for itself in a ruined landscape. Now the various regions fight among themselves for survival. Each battle in my game is a skirmish between two regions struggling for survival.

Total hours this week was about 13. (I can't say I tracked playtesting time perfectly)