Week 2 Report

8 figures of various bright colors. They each have different facial expressions. They have floating hands.
8 little guys
Dungeon room
A: a classic abandoned fort/castle aesthetic, pretty generic but it does fit the silly party game aesthetic were going for the best bc its an aesthetic everyone knows well and are comfortable seeing
Dungeon room, cooler colors
B: a more dark and spooky underground dungeon vibe, this leans more towards the horror aspect since all the walls and floors are dark, making even lit up rooms still seem dark and eerie
Dungeon room, greener shading with green patches on the ground and walls
C: also another abandoned fort/castle/temple aesthetic, this time with more nature elements infesting the place, this would make room to make the boss more plant/earth themed but also makes the game seems more serious? (in my opinion at least since the whole human vs. environment thing could be read into many diff ways)
Dungeon room, blue-purplish shading
D: a more high fantasy theme, with bright colorful walls and decorations, could might look too magical for a game thats about crafting more mundane tools, but maybe it would be cool?
Various anthropomorphic mushrooms, some monstrous, some cute
the boss could be some sort of mushroom king and the little minion is a tiny little mushroom minion who managed through slip through the cracks of the rock barrier and messes w the players as the mushroom king is breaking down the barrier
Three figures running away with a giant mushroom monster chasing them from behind, and a smaller mushroom in the air, with “Wrong Cave!” on top of everything
proposal: the game shall be called “Wrong Cave!”
the camera is moving on the client side, and all the boxes are being moved on the server side. the server only moves everything at 25 fps which is why it looks choppy
okay networking team, it draws your colliders now. there’s also support for flat squares if you want to add floors and stuff
A realistic fish intersecting a cube above a sea of dots
Y’ALL. THE FISH IS REAL

Group status

Meeting: Sunday, April 14, 2024

Towards our MVP, our game engine can now render Blender models and draw outlines of collision boxes. With a physics engine (cannon.js) powering game simulation on the server, objects can now collide with the environment and each other. Overall, we’d consider ourselves ahead of schedule.

Our main priorities, broken down by team, are:

We’ve also devised a new timeline that takes into account our progress and proposed new game logic system, codenamed George.

Our group morale is like a hungry mushroom monster ready to pounce and feast on a pack of puny miners entering a cave.

Individual statuses

Nick

  1. My goals were to create a reasonable format for sending data to the client so that the client could render what is happening in the physics engine. My other goal was to actually integrate the physics engine on the server side.
  2. I achieved both of those goals at a basic level. We were able to get the client and the server talking to each other
  3. The week went mostly as planned, but we made more progress than we initially planned for in the timeline, which is a good thing! I ran into a roadblock of figuring out what the best way to represent the world to the client would be through network requests though.
  4. Solidify the representation of objects from the server to the client by making classes that manipulate physics objects on the server side. Additionally, make a player object that can be controlled by client input.
  5. I learned a little bit more about cannonjs and how objects are represented in the physics engine. This gave me a bit of a better idea of how to represent game objects to the client
  6. It’s okay :\

Marcelo

  1. what were your concrete goals for the week?

    Setting up a working client to server connection and implement a foundation (request types etc.) for the game logic.

  2. what goals were you able to accomplish?

    We discussed about what controls our games need to have as a group.

  3. if the week went differently than you had planned, what were the reasons? note that this happens regularly…I would prefer you to be aggressive in what you want to try accomplish rather than limit yourself to goals you know you’ll easily achieve. so answering this question is more of a reflection on the development process and the surprises you encounter, it’s not at all an evaluation.

    I believe the way we delegate tasks is not productive and “everybody work together” does not yield a good result when we have a semi-medium sized team. However, I believe if we sorted out this issue as a team everyone will accomplish way more results.

  4. what are your specific goals for the next week?

    Getting back on track and design a bunch of tasks/mini-goals. Talk to nick so he don’t yell at me in the generals channel. Be on time.

  5. what did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it?)

    I learned how a web based game design a communication protocol between clients and servers using web sockets.

  6. what is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?

    Rock bottom. I do not feel motivated to the project or belonged to the group at all. I feel like I can quickly get on track and get on top of what is going on with a little bit of help but I do not know who to reach out to. (Killian’s amazing concept art was probably the only exciting part that motivates me)

Tyler

  1. what were your concrete goals for the week?

    My concrete goals for the week were to:

    1. Learning Typescript enough to understand the codebase
    2. Understand how the client interacts with the server on a deeper level
    3. Meet with Nick and other Networking team members so that we could pair program about how things actually work for my benefit
    4. Learn webGL enough to understand the codebase

  2. what goals were you able to accomplish?

    Actually, I nailed all of my goals!

    My goals themselves are a little strange: I didn’t plan that I would be solidly able to expand on the codebase at all, which is unfortunately just a given side-effect of not knowing javascript, typescript, or anything about networking. That being said, I think I planned for it quite well in my head, as I’m now fairly up to date on the codebase with my environment fully set up, and while pair programming I can actually help set up new features and structuring ideas.

  3. if the week went differently than you had planned, what were the reasons? note that this happens regularly…I would prefer you to be aggressive in what you want to try accomplish rather than limit yourself to goals you know you’ll easily achieve. so answering this question is more of a reflection on the development process and the surprises you encounter, it’s not at all an evaluation.

    Oh yeah, I had a huge amount of work come in from VGDC and other classes that I wasn’t expecting at all. We just hit VGDC officer interviews after starting our longer game jam, so I’ve been busy running around in meetings getting my ideas across and understanding what is needed of me.

    This meant that the weekend, where I was expecting to be able to get through the most development, was completely booked, meaning I both couldn’t do any development for the project as well as rest for the next week.

    I’m more than a little worried that the lack of true rest that I got will sap my energy for the upcoming week, resulting in even less work, but I’m going to be trying to rest more and push forward with the project as much as I can.

  4. what are your specific goals for the next week?

    1. Meet with Nick and the Networking team about the restructuring we talked about in the weekly meeting
    2. Create the capsule collider and successfully lock it’s y axis with Nick
    3. Create the Entity interface, and possibly create a few Entity implementations that we can test with and work on
    4. Talk with Marcello

  5. what did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it?)

    I learned quite a bit about typescript and how it works, and I learned that sometimes, being the first person to suggest a meeting will get everyone interested, even if it’s not related to them.

    The first non-weekly meeting that we had was supposed to be a pair programming session with Nick, but we ended up with solidly 6/7 members of the group going, to various degrees of success, but having everyone show up in that capacity was a surprise.

  6. what is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?

    Uhhhhh.

    My individual morale is a bit lower than I think the rest of the group’s morale is, but that’s partially because I’ve been so overworked in the past couple days. I also have some insider knowledge into the fact that, because I don’t know Typescript and am having the learn the language in such a hands on way, that my effect on the team is going to be significantly less than what I would both like it to be and what I think is expected of me.

    I think that I’m the least learned member of the group regarding knowledge and skill in programming, and I’ve got to make up for it in passion and effort, and man am I tired.

Killian

  1. My concrete goals this week were to create concept art for the game, decide on a specific aesthetic and storyline that would drive the look of the game, finish more Blender tutorials, and also help with game design.

  2. This week I was able to make concept art for the characters in the game, mock up different looks for the environment to get feedback from the team and decide on one that we’d like to move forward with, solidify a storyline that’s going to help drive the art direction and game design, sketch ideas for the boss and minion units, and ideate on some interesting gameplay mechanics.

  3. For this week, I definitely did not go through as many Blender tutorials as I wanted to with other classes and commitments in the way. Which is something I would want to focus on next week.

  4. Next week is a rather hectic week for me, but I would still want to complete all the concept arts needed for the game so when I create the 3D models, I have an accurate and reliable reference to use. I also want to focus on completing as much Blender tutorials as I can so I can be fully prepared to transfer my 2D work into 3D.

  5. This week, I learned more about Blender modeling with the tutorials I did get to complete, and also more about making environmental concept art, something I haven’t done much in the past.

  6. I am excited to see this game be made, but am nervous about my own ability to make a lot of 3D assets for the game since I’m relatively new at 3D modeling.

Sean

My goals for this week were to get the moving cube done because I felt that we are able to do it fairly quickly. Since we depended on the networking team to figure out the best format to send the game state in, a lot of our work is blocked by them. Therefore, as a secondary goal, I could alternatively work on parsing Blender models to prepare for whenever Killian is ready with them.

Fortunately, Nick added a physics engine on the server and sent the collision boxes to the client, so I worked on drawing wireframes for the collsion boxes. I then spent the weekend reading the glTF specification and implementing a parser.

Reading the glTF spec was pretty helpful because it offered one way to structure our game’s objects. I initially was going to have a server-synched Entity class that has a list of collision boxes for the server-side physics engine and a list of meshes to draw on the client. Each mesh would have a geometry (vertex data) and material (shaders) that would be defined independently, so we can swap out materials for the same geometry, and vice versa. I modelled this after three.js.

However, it turned out that our geometry was very closely associated with the shader it was meant for because different shaders require different attributes. I realized that a better structure would have Material be a property of Geometry, rather than having them as independent siblings.

In glTF, objects are represented as a tree hierarchy of nodes, which represent transformations that also apply to its children. Each node can have an associated mesh, which defines the attribute values (e.g. vertex positions and normals), as well as a material. I think our game state might end up being represented similar to this.

Ultimately, implementing a glTF parser myself taught me how 3D programs represent 3D models, and it made me more confident in using WebGL objects, like understanding the difference between vertex array objects and buffers.

My current morale is very motivated; it helps that my other classes are currently very light. I did more this week than I expected, but I worry that if I’m the only person who wrote the graphics code so far, it’ll be hard for others to catch up. Reading other people’s code is hard, and this is particularly the case for graphics code. Also, I think I should clean up the code (restructuring files, documenting code) before I work on anything else.

Therefore, my goals for next week are to clean up the client codebase and explain how my changes work to the rest of the team.

For the entire graphics team, I think our next steps are to add lighting to our glTF models. But we should also decide as a group how we want the game to look because realistic lighting won’t be great for a cartoonish look, and if our game takes place in darkness we may want to more carefully consider how we implement lighting.

Will

  1. My goal for the past week was to get a basic 3D box and camera setup running in WebGL. Part of this was also to learn a mapping of OpenGL concepts to WebGL, since I’ve used OpenGL in C++ a lot but never used WebGL.

  2. I was able to accomplish that goal: I created GameEngine, Camera, and Box classes and a simple shader program and got them to render client-side. It’s unlikely that we’ll keep this code around at least in its current state, besides maybe the Camera.

  3. I got the box to show up on the screen pretty quickly, since the logic for that is very similar to OpenGL. But I spent a while getting it to show up with the correct size and aspect ratio, because with WebGL there’s an additional layer of complexity with the <canvas> element which kind of has multiple notions of “size”. I think this is a pretty common issue in web development, but now that it’s (hopefully) been ironed out we can focus on the actual game from now on.

  4. Sean and Nick made crazy progress after I got the basic setup working, but there seemed to be client-side issues on Kenzo’s Mac. I also have a Mac so I’ll see if I can fix them. I also want to write some more shaders so we can test the limits of things like dynamic point lighting, because that will determine what kinds of aesthetics are possible. Finally, another goal for our graphics team overall is mouse-controlled camera movement, so I’ll work on that if I have time and someone else doesn’t get to it first.

  5. I learned that the WebGL workflow is pretty much the same as OpenGL’s (create buffers, populate them, point to them, send them + uniforms to GPU, draw). One difference was that WebGL 1 somehow didn’t support vertex arrays, but they were added in WebGL 2 so we’re using that.

  6. I’m excited that we have a solid-looking foundation to keep building on and our team has been good about sharing ideas openly and coming to a consensus. We seem to be ahead of schedule on the first big milestone, so I hope we can maintain this momentum.

Kenzo

My concrete goals for the week is to learn the fundamentals for WebGL so that I can contribute to the graphics portion of the game. I was able to finish learning the fundamentals for WebGL, and try to understand part of our graphics code.I was hoping that I can contribute a lot to the graphics part of the game, however, due to my lack of experience in graphics I was not able to understand a lot of the code that are on the GitHub, so my plan is to meet more often with my group members so I can learn from them and getting guidance so that I can contribute more to the code in future weeks. My goals for next week are to learn how to use Blender and try making programmer art so that we can try the graphics engine and putting the art into the game and also to fix the toon shaders so it can work properly. This week, I learned the basics of WebGL, how does the shaders work (fragment and vertex shaders), how to set them up, how to draw triangles, how to use the buffer, how to draw rectangles using 2 triangles. My individual morale is to learn as much as possible from this project as I am very new to the graphics field.

Meeting notes

Present: Sean, Kenzo, Tyler, Nick, Will

Excused: Killian

Left side of whiteboard summarizing our meeting notes
An illustration of an Entity, things we’ve implemented, our to-do list for this week, aspects of game design to decide on, and topics to research.
Right side of whiteboard summarizing our meeting notes
Our old and new timeline, a flow diagram of George as the intermediary, and how cannon.js works.

Footnotes

  1. Screenshot of Tunic's shading ↩