Weekly Dev Log #4 - Playable Level

Addressed Feedback

Player Colors - Players now have colors associated with their model and splitscreen camera

Minimap & Signs - To help players navigate the interior of the ship, signs and a minimap were added

Head/Eye player's mechanics - The head player now has more things to do to balance the interaction between the different parts of the body. Specifically the head player now controls when the arms are launched to encourage more coordination between the head and arms

Arm control / aiming / feel - The arms have been adjusted to make aiming and control easier though they are not final. Players now use right stick to control the pitch and yaw of the hand and left/right bumpers to control the roll of the hand with pitch/yaw being independent of the roll orientation. 

Unaddressed Feedback

The biggest thing  we have not addressed is camera layout. We chose to focus on the level mechanics first but we have been experimenting with different camera layouts such as the following to make the eyes camera view larger and declutter the other parts of the screen UI (such as minimap and dialogue). Below is one potential UI layout

New Level

The level 1 we built for this milestone features the following sequence of events:

1. Walking to the cafe chair and sitting (automatic sit)

2. Grabbing and placing spaghetti from our plate to the bag on the right

3. Grabbing evidence that spawns from Nova (out date)

4. A visual indicator of time left in the form of the cake our date is eating

5. A Pouring coffee task where pouring the pot fills the cup if placed correctly

6. Once time is up a scoreboard shows up with stats and a grade.

During  this level, the same random and timed events occurs as previously. Those are:

Blinking - The eye camera malfunctions and needs to be reset. This is a terminal interact right now but we plan to make this a minigame in a terminal  in the future.

Breaking the arm from use - If launched too many times, the hand launch will break and players need to enter the arm to fix it. This is also currently just a terminal interact but we intend to make it a minigame in the future. (This is not shown in the demo video)

Summary

We currently have a playable level that features the main mechanics we want to showcase.  We plan on modifying the way these mechanics work and tuning the controls before our scheduled playtesting session next week. We also now have a good enough picture of how our mechanics interact and how fun they are so we may consider more substantial changes like the camera layout and adding minigames before the playtesting session.