Devlog 12/9/2020 - RELEASE DAY!

Dylan

The final week before finishing up a game is always the most exciting and daunting! For the majority of development, the game went through many iterations. We experimented with many different mechanics, styles, and narrative tracts before finalizing what Dough Deep will bake into. After a successful Alphafest, we kept our main mechanics, leaving coding and gameplay design to be complete, leading us to finalize the narrative arc of the Muffin Man conspiracy and the Upper Oven level. The week was spent planning and writing out final dialogue lines and Upper Oven quests, and then after implementing said narrative. Additionally, final models, animations, UI, and main menu assets were all implemented as well.

McKenna

This week was mostly about polishing and getting everything looking/sounding pretty for me. I made the webpage for the game (this one, hello!) and the itch.io page where the game would reside. Dylan's friend had made some really awesome graphics that I made use of. The end result is fairly cheerful and cute, which is definitely somewhat strange considering how existential the game is, but that's the whole point of the game. I also composed the main background song and found some more sound effects from freesound.org. The main song took a lot longer than I expected to figure out because I really wanted to use the melody of "Do You Know the Muffin Man?" as the main melody and it's really hard to find things to go in the background of that. I composed a happier, more bubbly one first, but Dylan suggested since there's this looming doom of "everyone's going to die" that there should be some sort of somber tone. So I looked up what "Do You Know the Muffin Man?" sounds like in a minor key and put it into GarageBand with some small stylistic changes. Then I added some chords in a more upbeat rhythm, and then put some percussion to give it some movement. For the melody I decided on a clarinet because the reedy timbre made the melody sound especially sad. I decided to make the chords a piano because it sounded good with the clarinet. All this to say, the end product was a great combination of mournful and curious. Overall, this has been a very wonderful experience. This is actually my first time working on a game for an extended period of time, and it has been challenging, but a really great experience altogether. Part of me feels like I could have done more, part of me feels like I'm proud of what I did, and all of me is proud of my team. I really hope you all enjoy the game!

Tariq

For this final week, my focus was mainly on adding last minute textures to any untextured assets, completing a few final models, and completing all the character animations. The first step was to rig all of the characters which was a new experience for me, and one which went quite smoothly to my surprise. Previously I had only utilized the quick rig feature in Maya, but this time I was in Blender which proved to be a very streamlined task. After rigging all the individual models, I then began animating the various stances and actions of the player and NPC characters. For most of the models a simple idle animation was sufficient, while the player character required a few different action animations such as throw, walk, run, and jump. Many of the models had to be a bit cleaned up with different parts removed and reattached in a different way to offer better mobility. I also removed any unnecessary faces to reduce the polycounts of models further, making sure to keep every model below 300 polys as the guideline I had set for myself. Upon completion of these items, I was mostly finished with my part of the project. It has been a great ride, and I am grateful to my teammates for their hard work and dedication. They are both very inspiring to me for both their abilities to make a good game, and their undeterrable determination and drive. I look forward to seeing them both succeed in all their endeavors!