Hello everyone, this might be the last blog entry for the exam artist development for Spring 2020
Most of the feature is done, we are proud to present our trailer
We also have the full video walkthrough with the commentary detailing everything from peeking to time freeze.
We would like to thank you our TA Santhosh and Professor Vangelis for giving us support and feedback through the semester. The project was a sucess and the idea has materialized into a video game.
We look forward to see everyone who will attend USC Games Expo 2020!
Hello everyone, it has been a productive week. We excited to announce that we will be officially attend USC games expo 2020. Thank you everyone for everything you have done for us. In our project, there is a big overhaul implemented on it with many aesthetic changes and also implementation of many features. We have implement more than twenty changes to our project past week.
The Teacher AI is now able to go to a completely random position in the room and does not always follow normal behavior pattern, removing predictability from the game, thus creating challenge for player.
There is more cheating technique added into the game, bribing a student will make them distract teacher for a period of time while you are free to do as you pleased during that interval. Going to washroom now transport you to an actual bathroom and you can see the answer to questions you have. Throwing eraser will cause teacher to investigate the position you thrown eraser on.
Backend improvement is significantly improved, the result screen now shows what is the answer to the question you answered and also the choice you have chosen. Overall level detail and aesthetic has improved as we have more props added into the classroom and there is an exterior of the school outside the window if you look out of the classroom.
The project is nearing its goal and the final product will be shown at the expo. We hope to see you soon.
After spring break, We have suffer some setback from the current situation with the pandemic. We skipped two weeks worth of blogs and have some time off during spring break but after consideration we decide to keep working on the project. All of the work we are going to do will be a remote work, meaning we will not be physically meeting every week but instead we will use video conference to conduct our meeting every week.
The classroom visual has improved by a bit and we have the information of the blackboard in the front of the classroom and a digital clock to tell the time we have left. the lighting in the classroom is also improved.
We have new features added into the gameplay. Pressing Bribe UI button will have a student distract the teacher so you are really free to do anything when the teacher is distracted. We also test some features that might be added into the future including Randomized choices in the questions.
The Teacher AI has improved by a little bit, as we removed some bugs and improved detection of illegal action while pausing.
Overall, This blog is written to express our will to move on with the project despite facing with problems that we cannot do anything about. Our will is still strong and we will surely deliver a good game by the end of the semester.
Today, we finally deliver a level for the midterm, even though a lot of polish needed to be done, the demo we deliver is still what as we promised.
There is now a question sheet on the desk where player is and player can use their hand (with pen) to point and choose answer to the multiple choice questions. The questions and answer is retrieved from an outside JSON file and is randomized each play. Player now can only look at desk or at the blackboard and doing anything such as looking to the sides or leaning your body to other desk will be deemed as “Illegal”. Teacher will roam around the set waypoint and look around. If teacher happens to see you when you do illegal action the game will be over. You can go to washroom to get an answer to the question with a press of button and you can throw eraser (no real gameplay function yet).
Overall the level is playable and have core features added in, but more features need to be implemented along with heavy polish done for our game to meet beta.
The midterm is coming and we the goal in coming in our sight, A lot of things have been done regarding gameplay, level design, assets, and AI. We receive positive feedback regarding the design from the professor and we plan to stick to the current design so far.
We have learn from playing the similar game, Classroom Aquatics and our progress now is as of the similar level of that game, minus the assembling of all the parts. We still need to coordinate and put everything together as of now.
The gameplay part has saw improvement in player tracking and many mechanics has been implemented in. As seen in video demo, player now have legal and illegal actions if they do certain action like looking at the wrong way or looking up at the ceiling. We also implement a digital clock implemented in the board for now. Other students in the classroom is also actively marking correct answer for player to peek in.
The backend also have big improvement regarding the level system and the question paper, we are implement end game statistics for the player to see which questions they got right or wrong, most of progress regarding question paper has been done, but there is still some revamp needed for question paper.
The AI also saw some improvement as well, we have implement the detection system for teacher and AI. The animation is also implemented in the teacher character as well. Now the teacher can properly detect if you are actively doing illegal action or not.
We also have improvement on animations and audio asset, Teacher now emit footsteps sound as well as placeholder sound cue when player make illegal actions. Students are also placed on the level so that we see overall aesthetics of what level going to be like.
Overall, we think we are going to prepare for the midterm presentation as the first goal are nearly finish. We look forward to present everyone the labor of our hard work past 5 weeks we worked on.
This week there is a significant progress update to professor Vangelis, The build is more and more concrete by the day
We got in the models and put some animation to it, as well as basic construct of the level. The animation looks very good so far when rigged into the model we got, Some of the lighting is also done in the level albeit there is nothing outside the window as of now.
The gameplay is progressing well so far, with coordination from backend side, we are able to properly make a system to easily parse in new questions without hardcode in the question. We also set up rudimentary score system (not final) in to test the parsing system.
The pathfinding and navigation AI has seen an increase in concreteness as simple state machine is implemented into the character. The said character can move around the level while avoiding obstacle.
We also have a plan for level layout to have different iterations depends on level. The movement of the enemy (teahcer/proctor) will determine the difficulty of the level.
In conclusion, with this pace we are currently on, we may be able to reach our midterm goal just before midterm.
This week, after a feedback on design, we have everyone to come discuss ideas to finalize a concrete design on a game and that totally paid off.
During the week, everyone are to pitch their ideas for the game; pitching what came into the mind of everyone in order to find the right balance between realism and gameplay. There was some concern about the core gameplay will become too familiar with another game that set the standard for us, but in the end we came up with a unique idea on the main mechanic of the game which is a little bit different from what everyone thought in the first idea but seems to be more exciting and fun to play. More information on the design document draft.
On the technical side, everyone have made quite a progress on many parts: the AI, the level design, the animation and asset, and backend with gameplay being in lead and most advanced. There are some changes to the plug-in of the gameplay part but the result is shown that some important mechanics are in place, as seen and video.
It has been an exciting week as everyone has advanced from have absolute zero in Unity environment to competent game developers now.
This week, we made sure that every team member have enough time to familiarize themselves with Unity tutorial and Unity engine in general.
The tasks are divided into section in building the foundation of the game; Back end, Scripted events, Level, Basic gameplay, etc. The most noticeable progress this week has gone to the gameplay section has our team has grasp a basic understanding of VR development in general. In video, we were able to use Oculus
Also the project now has GIT set up and everyone have their progress saved into the shared git directory. and a blog was hosted thanks to wordpress.
Overall, this has been a slow but steady week, achieving a modest progress while everything is in cohesion.
The project has officially begun and we have received Oculus Rifts from the faculty. Everyone in project is eager to work on their assigned roles and job. We have set up Slack for communication and Trello for task management.
Everyone has been briefed on unity basics via a small workshop session held focusing on absolute fundamentals of how to utilize the engine’s capability and its ease of use. According to team member feedback, they now have a core understanding of unity development and game development in general.
The Exam Artist 