Things I did last week:
- Fixed texture problems with Zedna's model
- Made the civilian's model
- Made the Febreze bottle's model (in progress)
Things I'm planning to do this week:
- Finish modeling the Febreze bottle
- Make some adjustments to the civilian model
- Animate the character models
Apparently the problem with Zedna's texture mapping is that, if you have multiple UV sets in Maya, you can't select which one to export, and Unity only reads the first one. Also, transparency seems to be working differently between Maya and Unity, so I'll remove the transparency in Zedna's model.
As for the civilian model, I made him to have separate materials for each of his components. This is so it's easy to customize him in Unity, so that we can make what you can essentially call palette swap. In addition, during yesterday's class, I received feedback on the model's shape, so I'll be fixing that this week.
Another component of the class was the feedback we got from our presentation. We were told that it's not clear yet what makes this game fun, so we should make that clear in two weeks. After some discussion, we decided that, along with implementing the blocked-out level in Unity, we would animate the character models, as right now, the level feels lifeless (although, admittedly, it's a barebone sandbox). I'll at least start working on that. I may pass the Febreze modeling to someone else, though.
This week, I didn't watch or play anything zombie-related, but I might as well elaborate on one particular game that caught my interest, which is Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. The game is best described as a combination of Persona 4, Ace Attorney & Battle Royale. It's about a group of high school students with extraordinary talents who are trapped in Hope's Peak Academy by a sadistic robot bear named Monokuma. In each chapter (at least, those I've played), Monokuma essentially forces the students to kill each other by providing motive. Each chapter starts with the player having free time, which is used to socialize with other students a la Persona 4. Then, once a body is discovered, the player will take some time investigating before being taken to the courtroom, where all the students debate to decide who's guilty. After all, voting on the wrong guilty party would cost them all their lives except the real guilty party, who would then be released from the school, and if they voted right, only the guilty party would be executed.
I like Danganronpa for its strong detective mechanic, which would feel like any Ace Attorney game, but thanks to a well-written plot and a time-based gameplay during the trial session, you would definitely need to work your brain in order to solve the case. Unlike many mystery media though, this game, courtesy of the sadistic Monokuma, shows just how the guilty party is executed (each execution is specially made based on the guilty party's personality), and that makes this game stand out from series like Ace Attorney or Case Closed. In short, this game makes fun of the mystery genre by not giving the reader/player satisfaction from solving the case, and instead blames the player for voting on the guilty party (although the player would die otherwise). I think that this is one way Survival Zombie could have made fun of the zombie genre, which is by not providing the player relief after killing all the zombies.
