Chapter 7 - The Council of Douglas

In these posts I normally don’t give an explanation to the titles, as they speak for themselves usually, but this one not so much. The title is a reference to Lord of the Rings’ Council of Elrond where they decide what they are going to do with the one ring (Note, I have never seen LotR, but I have seen the Martian about 15+ times). I chose to go with this title as we had a meeting that was just pure magic and Cody, our Producer, leads all of our meetings. Hence the name The Council of Douglas is born!

​The Council of Douglas set a ton of major things into motion and set up the second half of capstone perfectly.

​The first and probably most important was that we did Doomsday style planning for every remaining Quality Assurance Testing (QA) session in the semester. This way our team would know exactly what we will be testing for in the next 13 Sessions until of Presentations on November 19th!

​One of my major tasks this week was doing a basic level design blockout so that Ellie could have a better vision of some environment art that we could have in the game. I put the majority of my time this week into creating a space that is open enough to allow for some chaos, and have definitive sections that create a believable environment.  The map currently may not seem like it has much in it, but that is because we only have destructible objects at the moment and grey/white bricks don’t do the best job at selling our world feel.

​Some other things Dustin and I have started adding is player feedback. This can range anywhere from VFX using Cascade in Unreal, SFX either by finding free sounds online or using my voice, UI for basic images that show players something is happening, and controller rumbles. Player feedback in our game is huge because we really want players to know what is happening at all times in our game. We added a hitmarker and noise for when players successfully use an ability on greed, and a rumble for greed when they are hit by an ability.

The main few aspects of “The Council of Douglas” allowed for all of the progress our team had this week. With the QA scheduling, future sprint planning, and overall preparation to guide us to the Presentations!

Something none of us knew though that it would also create a new drive within us to change our team’s name to what we originally wanted it to be going into the semester. Say hello to “The League of Evil”.