This week started of with me improving the tool I had made in the first month I think. The tool for the level introduction by the use of Timeline and Cinemachine was hard to use for the level designers. It required them to set it up each time they opened a level, all kinds of bindings to the main camera, scene objects and what not. So it was my job to make this workflow easier. It talked a bit with Jouke (level designer) and Timen (game designer) and made a list of stuff that had to be improved.
At first I thought I needed to make some kind of custom timeline clip, which is a lot of work and I got a little spooked by this. I talked to Tim and he suggested to maybe just use some prefabs inside the current level introduction prefab to set the targets for the camera’s to focus around. I guess I sometimes need some outside view whenever I feel stuck on solving a problem. This solution solved a lot of my problems. Next to this I needed some way to set the Cinemachine Brain to all the Cinemachine tracks in all the active timelines in the prefab. This required some Googling but it worked out in the end.
The last time I had touched this tool it kind-of felt unfinished but it had to be like that because of the deadline on the vertical slice. Now I had the opportunity to improve it, which at first I didn’t feel very motivated about because I thought it would be a mountain of work. In the end it proved to be very rewarding, and satisfactory to be able to say: You can use this tool and you only need to set these camera target transforms to a position you like in the level. Instead of the whole explanation I needed to do before.
I think because of my work on the enemies and the functionality for the level designers I had to make on those, I realised what kind of set-up they were used to. This made it easier for me to improve the tool I made at the start of my internship.