Hey everyone!

Not a huge update today, but there was something in particular that was developed that I think will help out a lot on the audio side of things.

Reading Audio Files Externally

So in the previous workflow, any time one of our sounds guys created new sounds, I would have to import them into Unity, rename, and reassign them to the right objects/code for them to play correctly. I would then need to build a new executable or record gameplay for others to see sounds in action. Having to do this constantly to check/test different iterations/versions can get a bit time-consuming…

We’ve recently implemented a way to allow for reading external sounds files, which allows for swapping out sounds by placing them into a directory where the game build is located, and then giving them the correct name (i.e jump.ogg, attack1.ogg, etc)

This will allow the audio team to test out their sounds and edits much more quickly and independently if needed.

For devs out there using Unity, we managed to do this using WWW and StreamingAssets!

Speaking of Audio…

The Audio Team and I had a meeting last week! (First time we managed to get mostly everyone on the mic together). We spent most of the meeting going over some of the planned tracks, and how to split the work between everyone.

Have you all had a chance to hear some of the tracks that are out? We’ve created a SoundCloud a while back where we’ll be uploading some of the tracks as they become available!

In addition to that, there were some other items worked last week:

• Added a “Screen Effects Manager”, which handles display full-screen effects/flashes and other dramatic things (like dimming the background when a special move is being used or overlaying the screen with a particular color)
  
• Added functionality to “Freeze” the screen. This will pause most things going on-screen and works as a nice dramatic effect as well if used with a timer.
  
• Fixed a bug where the battle UI (HP and SP) wasn’t getting updated anymore. This was mostly due to a lot of the battle code being cleaned up.
  
• Identified that not using “polygon colliders” for the level pieces once merged can cause some collision issues, such as an actor getting “punched through” a collider.
  
• Getting the Game Over event to reset the game state and reload the scene, so that the Editor and game build don’t need to be restarted once at the end of the demo.
  
• More Updates to the behavior tree system, which will allow for writing “smarter” AI