Troglodyte in Underbelly

Author: Daniel Reder  The underbelly cave system is meant to create an atmosphere that is both scary and somewhat confusing. Because of this, the elements of the underbelly need to be unpredictable, yet constant. There must be elements that will trigger enough to keep the player immersed, but not at a pace that can be recognized. To handle this, I created an object I call the Soundcue. Soundcue's all know about each other, and hold a list of sounds that can be triggered by the player entering a collider.   Once the players has entered any of the triggers connected to the object, the sound will play in an area near the player that they cannot reach. This will disable the other triggers, in order to prevent sounds from overlapping each other, as this would easily break immersion. After the sound finishes playing, a delay up to a set maximum will be set, not allowing any sounds to play until the delay is over.

Quested Abode Jordan Ireland This development cycle was dedicated to creating a new house scene with enhanced aesthetics and implementing a new quest or goal system featuring journal entries to track progress and discoveries. The objective was to design a house environment that not only looked visually appealing but also contributed to the immersive storytelling experience. Additionally, the implementation of a quest system with journal entries aimed to provide players with clear objectives and a sense of direction while exploring the game world. Failing to achieve these goals would result in a lackluster player experience, where the narrative and progression elements may feel disjointed or incomplete. The challenge involved designing and implementing both the new house scene and the quest system with journal entries. For the house scene, I focused on creating visually stunning environments by leveraging advanced lighting, textures, and props to evoke a sense of atmosphere and...

Author: Shemaiah Nelson Date: 3/25/2024 During this week's development for "Troglodyte In Underbelly," I was tasked with implementing a setting within the options menu to control the ambient light in the scene. While this seemed straightforward initially, I soon realized that integrating this feature posed significant complications due to the existing day-night cycle system. The primary issue stemmed from the interaction between the ambient light setting and the dynamic changes in lighting dictated by the day-night cycle. While I was able to successfully implement functionality to control the ambient light, it became apparent that any adjustments made were overwritten whenever the time changed as per the day-night cycle. This resulted in inconsistent lighting conditions and detracted from the immersive experience we aimed to deliver to players. To overcome the challenges encountered with implementing ambient light control within our game's options menu while preservin...

Unified Environment Jordan Ireland This week, a significant focus was on remaking the house map to better align with the aesthetics of the Underbelly environment. Previously, the house map felt out of place due to its different style compared to the Underbelly map. To address this, I revamped the house map, extensively adjusting terrain and lighting to create a more cohesive visual experience. However, challenges arose due to technical issues such as models with two-faced rendering and compatibility issues with Unity's tree system in the Universal Render Pipeline (URP). These issues led to inconsistencies in lighting and required the recreation of shaders for foliage elements like leaves and bushes. Failing to resolve these issues would result in visual discrepancies and a lack of immersion for players transitioning between the house and the Underbelly. The House Map Before: The core challenges stemmed from technical limitations affecting lighting and foliage renderi...

  Author : Daniel Reder In almost every video game, balance is a very important aspect. A game where the player is over tuned feels too easy to play, while a game where the enemies are overturned may make gameplay tedious. Troglodyte In Underbelly is no different, where as the enemies must be tuned to match the areas they reside in or the player may run into scenarios that are too easy or too difficult.  In this case, the rat enemy's default stats had it tuned for a much more open area. However, the area the rat actually resides in is very tight quarters.  Because of this, the values of the rat had to be tweaked in this instance in order for the rat to not simply run the player down upon arriving in this area. The rat works off of sound, meaning that when the player sprints, the rat moves towards the players last known location. When the player walks, the rat's ability to detect the player is diminished. The rat was hearing the player from too far away, while also no...

 Troglodyte In Underbelly: Git Issues This week, while adding some of the prefabs I created and the new Oasis 2.0 map, I encountered some issues related to Git. This was similar to one of the issues my teammate was having last week related to file size. The House map, for some reason, went from 6 MB to more than 600 MB. I had used the map to test the prefabs and then deleted them at a later commit, but for some reason, the map file size was huge. Later on, I was able to fix the file size (This was because somehow the map rebuilt itself using Global Illumination On in the terrain settings, so I just had to turn that off). But even after fixing the file size, it was complaining about it being too big. I figured this was because past commits still had that issue, so I looked into it.  I tried some solutions suggested by people, but nothing seemed to work. In the end, this resulted in both the Main Map and the House map having a duplicate index, which was throwing an error that wo...