Planet Nine Dev Log Week 8

Another week down and another 7 to go. Planet Nine is nearing the end of Alpha now. We currently have 4 levels that need to still be stitched together, however they all are playable from start to finish. The game is starting to come together and we should have a new playable build up sometime next week.

Anyway let's take a look at what this week has had in store for us! 

Starting like always with Ronan. This week Ronan has been working on many things. He first started off with integrating the modular level with the main level to replace the art assets and help the area look more pretty. He then did another lighting pass of the level to ensure that all the lights were up to standard and that they were not broken. Ronan also did some set dressing and made some tweaks to the scene as well as creating an entirely new “Starting sequence” ; this new sequence tasks the player with decontaminating a room of toxins. It is a quite simple yet effective sequence that gets the player up to speed with the mechanics quite promptly. Finally Ronan made some more tweaks to his toxin particle FX.

Marcus has been working on the diegetic hologram UI again. He has tweaked the UI to make it so that the hologram appears right in front of the player after an animation occurs. He is still working on the sizing and readability of the Menu. However as a placeholder it already looks really nice and coupling it with the animation really helps with keeping the player immersed in the game. 

Charlie worked on getting a system in place that lets players rotate objects around, allowing players to manipulate objects in ways that could help them to solve a puzzle. This system works very well and is activated through an input on the mouse. He also played around with some of the physics in the game and did some more bug fixing as well as implementing some audio through programming. 

Noah is away on holidays for the next 3 weeks but is helping out wherever he can from overseas.

Moving onto the design team, Dan did some more greyboxing this week, coming up with new areas for the player to explore and complete puzzles in. He also rearranged some of the existing levels to spread out each “mechanic tutorial” and have them better spaced out and flow more naturally . He also created another really cool event that happens in the game when you reach a certain point. I will not spoil this as it is something within the level that you should experience yourself, but it is at this point. (see image below) 

Will has strayed away from audio stuff this week and has been working on his conveyor level. He finished his greybox and got Myself and Dan to test it for him. We gave Will some feedback but that also led to us refining the player controller as well as we noticed that the jump mechanic was very floaty, and when maneuvering around Will’s level it made it very difficult to jump from one conveyor to another. Other than that will also did some puzzle design for his level and has been iterating on the level based on the feedback he has received.

For myself this week I got stuck into finalizing the layouts, as well as starting to set dress my puzzle rooms. The puzzles all work as intended and I can finish both without having to break the game. I got Dan, Charlie & Will to playtest both puzzles for me and I still have to make some tweaks to it based upon the feedback they have given me. But at this stage it looks very promising. I also created some extra rooms that serve no other purpose than for set dressing. I have created a little office space that looks really nice and I am really proud of what I have accomplished. Next week I will begin integrating the levels into the main game. But for now they both work and are relatively harder puzzles to complete. 

Finally moving onto the artists, Connor started working on the trim sheets for some of the textures, he also began working on a “texture document” that all the artists will use when creating textures. He also fixed up some of the bad geometry on the initial modular asset pieces and has implemented all of his changes into the engine. 

Petra continued her work on the corpse, creating many different variations of the corpse models that we can position around the map for set dressing. She also rigged the corpse so that we can ragdoll them in the game so that will make for some really nice effects. She also began implementing her set dressing assets into the game as Blueprints and they are readily available for everyone to use in engine. 

Lachlan kept working on sculpting his Flora assets as well as fixing the UV’s on them and began implementing these into the engine. 

Kye was absent this week, however he should be back by next week.

That is all for this week folks! Thank-you again for having a read and staying up to date with our progress on the game. We are all very excited for you to play Planet Nine when it releases, if you want to check out our very early Alpha build it is on our Itch page right here and if you want to see any of the previous Dev Logs they are available on my Medium Page right here.