Demo Launch!

Hello, everyone! This is Mingyue speaking, the lead artist of our new game project called "Wolfie"!

I am working together with the amazing Gina on this project, and she will be the lead coder in our team of two. As you may know, we have worked together on previous projects before, and we are excited to work together again for something bigger, better and cooler than any other game project we have made so far!

This is our Final Year Project at our University, and we will be spending around half a year making this game, so we have a long journey ahead of us! The release of this Demo is but one first step into public release and while there is very little content in this build of the project, we are working hard behind the scenes to make sure everything is in place for production to begin in earnest. So, this demo serves more as a test run to make sure our game systems are functioning and ready for reproduction in more scenes.

Pre-production

While we know the setting and design of Wolfie, a lot of the NPCs and scene details has not been confirmed and are still in the conceptualisation phase. We have some enemies, objects and a boss fight to design as well. My goals is for most, if not all the concept art to be done by the end of next month. 

More on the Demo

What is in the demo?

There is only one small scene available in the Demo. The setting of the Demo is an area slightly after the beginning of the game, when Wolfie leaves his home to go on his first quest. It will be an area where players are learning the controls and fighting passive enemies for the first time. 

We have added the antagonists of the game into the scene as well, and you can talk to them at the bottom right of the scene and observe how Wolfie interacts with them.

What is missing from the demo?

Wolfie has 2 fighting abilities with he yellow umbrella. They can swing the umbrella but also open the umbrella to block attacks. That Blocking function has not been implemented in the game. 

We will also have a crafting mechanic for Wolfie to make tools and complete some quests using his crafting skills.

What have we learned from the demo?

This demo has been a very valuable experience moving forward! We faced some issues porting the game to WebGL with the wasm (Web Assembly) file errors but it turns out there's a setting in Unity to ignore the errors instead of freezing the game. Of course, the best case scenario is if we can resolve the issue at it's root, so we will still look into it and see what else can be done.

We have changed our asset import method from last time to have assets in sprite sheets to decrease load time, however the sizes of some assets are not well adjusted and show up blurry/ in low quality when arranging assets in the scene. With more focus on modular assets and thus more building of scenes inside unity, our methods for ordering layers have also changed and need to be refined.

We also noticed that the movements for Wolfie needs more editing as their jumps are shorter than we wish, and our current calling methods also need to adjust to account for holding down movement arrow buttons while pressing jump button.

In terms of art and lighting, the contrast between character and environment is quite low and we need to fine-tune the colour schemes a lot more in order to Wolfie to stand out from their environment.

If you have other things you noticed when playing the demo, please let us know in the comments!

Our Plans

We have already conducted 2 Android mobile tests and we will be conducting our first iOS test soon as well. So far, the development for mobile has been successful, though we will be surer once the iOS test is complete.

I think our first priority is to fine-tune Wolfie's movement controls before moving on to the crafting mechanism. There is much to do for concept art as well, and I am looking forward to refining my concepts on the environment and characters.

Please look forward to Devlogs starting soon as we fix the problems we noticed from the demo!

-Mingyue