Weekly Update 8/24/2013

This week was mostly about starting production of level 2, named 'Airship':

The original concept was by Josh, and built upon by the rest of the team. The level starts out with a skydiving sequence, where the player controls which airship Sam lands on. Once landed, Sam has to jump from airship to airship to make it to the giant zeppelin where the level objective is either a lost operative or a map piece. The player can choose their own path, as there are several airships that are spread out over a wide area.






Here is an early WIP video of the basic level design:





...and a video showing the entire level and moving airships, with some background elements as wel;:







Steven also animated Sam climbing a ladder, and integrated it into the anim tree...

...and created a repair droid and animating its flying cycle.







The purpose of the repair droids are to transport the player from ship to ship. Un-alerted, they simply fly around randomly and you have to wait until they get you to the ship you want.

If you want to go to a specific ship, you have to sneak into the control room and fire a canon to the ship you want, and all the repair droids will fly there to fix it, making the process faster, but more there's more risk of alerting the enemy.



In this demonstration video the droids wait until you are on top of them and then start moving, but in the final version they will simply fly from ship to ship regardless of where you are.







You might have noticed that Sam's head was moving around and looking at stuff in the previous videos. This is because of the skeletal control track we added into the anim tree:



This is done so Sam will look at an object of interest. We don't know how to specify which object, however. Right now he only looks at the origin of the level, AKA 0,0