Alpha

Week 3: Alpha

For this week, we mainly focused on solidifying our identity and mechanics of our game. We had an identity crisis of how our game would actually make educating people on dinosaurs fun, so we had plenty of discussions regarding that. Along with that, we began implementing more core features as well. Lastly, we’ve received a lot of feedback from a vast amount of people.

Our camera feature is also almost done. We managed to get the camera to be able to detect the dinosaurs that are in front of it using vectors and angles. Along with that, whenever the user takes a picture, they are able to see the picture in a widget. There are some issues where the camera isn’t able to detect the terrarian since line trace doesn’t work well with our map. There is some sort of foliage that is blocking the line trace whenever it fires out. Besides that, we still need to implement some missions for the user to do in order for them to passively learn about the dinosaurs.

We have added a home scene in the game, which is a spacecraft for the player to time travels. To make the logic of the whole project fluent, we also implemented different panels, including the intro/background scene, the information related to dinosaur eras, the player guide. and the dinosaur information in the booklet. Next week, we will add some dialogues with the dinosaur to teach the player how to interact with the world.

Also, to improve the educational purposes of our project, we did a lot of research about dinosaur facts and splitted our dinosaurs into different eras. We had six types of dinosaurs in total. Three of them are in the Jurassic period and the other three of them are in the cretaceous period. In our project, we will lead the player to explore the dinosaur world following the time. We put them in different parts of our map with different environments.

For the mechanics of the dinosaurs, we improved the random movement logic so that they will switch animations when they are moving or are idle. We also fixed a lot of our blueprints and restructured the way we actually implemented a dinosaur. Also, the feeding system has been improved. The dinosaur only eats the food they want. We will show the food type information in the booklet. Furthermore, to attract the player to explore more, we will lock the riding features until the player successfully feeds this type of dinosaur.

Next week, we plan to polish a lot of our user interactivity. We still need to polish the storyline and improve the UI. Also, some of the UI designs and controls are not intuitive enough for the current stage. Furthermore, we may add some small features like the audio, the screen shaking when T-rex dinosaur comes and some visual effects to improve user experience. Lastly, we are still deciding on how we are displaying dinosaur facts to the player.