Planet Nine Dev Log Week 6

It’s been a busy week for Team Nova this week, as we begin to head towards our final weeks of Alpha. At this stage We are looking to enter Beta within two weeks but do have our “buffer” weeks that we can use if need be. At this stage we are all working towards getting our game playable from start to finish and ensuring we can stay on track. 

Here is what everyone has been working on this week.

Programming:

Ronan kept working on his new and improved version of the Toxin Particle System that he has developed. He is calling this version the “Toxin Particle 2.0” as it differs slightly from the old version that he had created. It works as intended and is better for performance. The new version can also mold to different shapes and sizes and overall it works better than the previous version does. He also began doing a “lighting pass” through the tutorial level to ensure that all lights in the scene are working as intended and look as good as they possibly can. 

Marcus was working on the UI this week. He ended up getting the gamma option to work within the settings and made the percentage options scalable by typing in numbers to the box and setting the desired input that way. Marcus also worked on implementing particles into the laser beam and got them to fly around when coming into collision with an object. 

Noah finally got the conveyor belts working with no hitches or broken physics. To say that he was stoked would be an understatement. The conveyors now work as intended and are no longer buggy and broken. They will move the players or objects around on the belt and will not break the game anymore. He also refined his save system and fixed the data corruption bug.

Charlie was away this week so he didn’t work on anything. However we knew this in advance as he had informed us previously. He will be back next week. 

Design:

Dan expanded upon his current greyboxing efforts. He continued greyboxing new areas for the first level this week and began dressing the areas with placeholder assets. He also worked on implementing more feedback from the initial playtesting and made small refinements to the playable areas.

Will has been continuing with his work on the audio for the game. This week he went through all the clips he sourced and created and started implementing more into the game. He has also been working on finishing off the ambience sound effect and ensuring that it fits into the game properly.

For myself it was a rather slow week compared to previous weeks. I continued my work on concepting the puzzle for the second level and have made some refinements to it. It still isn’t quite as challenging as I had hoped, so I have gone back to the drawing board and started to look for some inspiration from similar games. This process has definitely been more challenging than I had initially anticipated. However I am learning a lot from this process and am excited to use these skills in the future.

Art:

Continuing his work from last week, Connor worked on the blockout level in Engine and created a set piece using his modular kit. Using the walls, floors and Roof assets he created, Connor created a playable scene using the layout from the tutorial level to envision what the level would look like with these art assets within it. An image taken from Connor’s work is shown below. 

Petra was working on creating modular assets that can be used for set dressing. These assets include miscellaneous items such as tools, pallets, wheelbarrows, pipes, keypads etc. Petra also began working on creating animations for the tech grip. These will activate when the player moves, jumps or interacts with things. Although they are not hooked up properly at the moment, they look good already. 

Lachlan has continued with sculpting some flora assets. These assets are very detailed and are really nice to look at. They really match the aesthetic of the game and will look amazing once implemented in engine. He also continued refining the Data Log UI and made some subtle but necessary tweaks.

Kye created some new environment assets for the game, these include different types of walls to help[ break up big areas. There are walls with broken panels, pipes and broken pipes, as well as smaller walls and thinner walls. He also continued to work on sculpting his flora assets as well.

That is all for this week guys. Thank-you again for checking out this week's dev log. We will continue working on the project and will have another Dev Log up for you to read sometime next week. If you want to check out the previous week’s Dev Log’s to stay up to date on the progress of Planet Nine, They are on my Medium page which is linked here.

You can also check the game out for yourself here.