Reshoot
In preparation for the alpha build, we’re trying to implement small cutscenes to make the game feel more cinematic and dynamic. To do this, the programming team was finally given the cutscenes and how we were to try and implement them.
Just to clarify, the cutscenes themselves are perfectly fine. They’re even beautiful. However, my fumbling of the task was quite the ugly scene, one could say. I spent a bulk of time messing around with asynchronous scene loading in Unity to try and get the cutscenes to load in a separate Unity scene. However, although I kept feeling like I was making progress, it felt like I was always missing something.
Eventually, it was decided that we’d implement the cutscenes within the same cutscene that the player is in. The first half of my week was spent trying to load the new Unity scene properly; the second half was about transfering the work to the OttoHouse scene. This meant reorganizing the cutscenes several times and trying to find the best way to implement everything.
I decided to make several scripts to handel the different steps in the process of running a cutscene. Thankfully, a lot of animators and animations are used to fade out and fade in the cutscenes, so I was able to make behavior scripts with functions that are called once animations are finished. This allowed me to easily manage the order of events.
Next Week
The good news is that next week I get to continue my work on the cutscenes, which has proven to be an exciting challenge that’s opening my mind to more ways to solve Unity-related problems. On the other hand, the bad news is that this is turning into a multi-week assignment, something I don’t like all too well. I wish I could get this done sooner so I can get to fixing the bugs left before the alpha build. Nonetheless, cutscenes will be the bulk of the work next week.
Media Rec
I recently got Frostpunk for free from the Epic Games Store. I started playing it one night and couldn’t stop. I love resource management games, and Frostpunk offers a very interesting setting to experience classic resource management mechanics. It also implements some of its own interesting twists, namely the political side of it. The design team did a great job making political policies a valuable resource that is scarce and integral to the survival of your civilization. I still haven’t gotten very far, but I just know I’m going to be spending plenty more time playing throughout the rest of 2021.