This week was spent on the little fixes – getting in the remainder of the HUD elements, including finalising the game’s Coolness Meter, as well as a score counter to contextualise the score a little bit.

A great deal of the week was also used in trying to connect and debug the character animations, which will be of great importance to the presentation of the game. Dealing with the animation montages, and ensuring that animations were being called and blended properly, required a large amount of collaboration with the programmers, as I needed to understand how each callable action was in fact referred to, and whereabouts in the overall scheme of the project. In addition, a lot of gameplay tweaks in the enemy spawning placement needed to be done.

I also managed to texture a clapper for the intro animation as seen from last week, this time creating an interesting chalk effect on the board. I also hope to smooth out the animation to create a really interesting transition animation from the main menu and the level screen.

An important piece of advice that was offered was to begin packaging the project for delivery – while two weeks does indeed sound like a lot of time to simply have a vertical slice ready to ship, it’s always smart to get started sooner than later. After tallying up some of the must-have features which we are lacking , some rather important things began to show, such as:

• The entire set of sound effects that need to be done
• A logo
• A win screen
• HUD feedback in response to the combat
• Reconnecting the particle effects that were lost when replacing the main character mesh.
• A gameplay video
• Finalising the main menu

It does seem to feel that there is a considerable chokepoint through which a lot of the work is probably going to rely on me. Here’s hoping this next week goes well!