I have re uploaded my full devlog in one post as itch has a limit of 40 posts before it starts to delete the oldest post.
Originally I had it split into two week uploads. So I have done my best to add dates to this devlog. Below is the screenshot of my original devlog posts

April 26 - May 10

Basic concept and ideation:

Detective game, film noir set in a 3 floor hotel

This was discussed further, and due to time constraints we opted to set the game in one location, settling on having it in a ball room (Idea of one space inspired by the murder mystery film Murder on the Orient Express)

We also agreed on finding a base story that we could take heavy inspiration from  shows like Midsummer Murders

Discussed within the group who would take on what roles:

Scripting UI/UX - Faye

Character & Animation - Hazel

Environment and Technical artist - Em

Environment Artist- Matt

Created a google doc with Faye to lock down the story flow and script, as well as building character profiles for the victim and suspects

Gathered some reference images with Matt for how we want the ball room to look

After narrowing down what era we are setting this in, it gave us a time period to look into architecture. 

After narrowing down what era we are setting this in, it gave us a time period to look into architecture. To help narrow down the style I decided on creating a backstory for  the ballroom. The ballroom is attached to an existing upper class Hotel. The hotel is an iconic building in the township of Moorcliffe. Suggesting it had been there some time.

This means the hotel may have been built at the end or after the industrial time period (1840-1860s), and since been updated a few years later would have had industrial and Art Nouveau architecture.

Due to it being an older building, and the ballroom popular to hire out for high end functions, I decided likely but had been decorated and slightly modernized into the art deco time period. This meant adding lots or curves, and keeping some of what would be the previous Art Nouveau textures, on trims and the roof. But adding art deco patterns to wall papers and curtains to modernise a dated building.

This time round I want to plan more heavily and in more detail to make it quicker and easier for me to complete the modeling and level design.

Matt and I designed the basic floor plan. The idea for a further iteration is to have the room flow but subtly split into 4 areas, based around the 4 suspects to lift their personalities.

Eg: the social butterfly close to the drinks and dance floor, the harder character near the bar in a dimmer lit corner. This is a subtle way to manipulate the player

Created the unity project and added a mock scene

Created some modular pieces in maya

Assembled the top floor placeholders in Unity

Created new wall pieces, and imported them

Adjusted the prefab to close some gaps

Created a front door

Created more prefabs to work with - Top window, doors, walls 

Updated window and door prefabs

Extending the top floor at the back to accommodate for people being able to go up and sit and talk

Possibly add chairs and a bar.

Added curtains to the scene

Imported the new stairs for nav mesh bake

May 11 -  May 25

Began to UV the assets created, to replace in unity and behind texturing. The reason behind importing the models into unity before doing all this was so that the scene was ready for Faye quicker to bake the nav mesh and so play testing could be done earlier. Also in case there were any issues with my pieces fitting together, it made it easier to quickly edit in maya and reimport.

UV of assets complete.
Organizing the UV sheet done, with priority on interactable higher poly models for detail. For example

The curtains in this UV sheet are much bigger to capture more detail.

Faye assigned me some more models to make, which would be what the player interacts with. These were the whiskey bottle, the drink flavour and a duplicate that will be the killer's poison and a trash can in which some clues will be found.

The main challenge for me was creating a nice shaped trash can, that wouldn’t look out of place in a scene. Alongside this, making sure the glass bottles didn’t look too modern, as the time this is set is around the very end of alcohol prohibition.

I exported the models again, with their new UVs to begin texturing in substance painter.

While doing this I made sure to refer to our moodboards and the textures in bioshock to get the look right. A mix between cartoon and realism, but a heavy focus on the characters, so when texturing the room I didn't want to go too out there and distract from the characters.

Talked with Vijay about poly budgets, and getting a good bake for some assets.

We talked through my current assets, and how they look and created a new plan for what I could achieve instead to push the look further.

Looked at palace and white, gold, sea foam green colours.
From this I concluded that I should stick to a very small colour palette, with the addition of one metal colour.
For us these colours are White/ off white, Gold, Black and Red

Continue of wall design

For the bottom floor walls, this image became a huge inspiration.

Baked the curtains

Remade Bottom floor walls after talking with Vijay

UV’d  walls

Re made the top floor walls, instead of having 3 elements I decided to go with two

This was to reduce budget and poly count

Test Textured the walls

Imported the new top floor walls into unity after doing the UVs, after doing this I remade a roof to fit better and to then texture later

May 26 - June 10

Made a new front door, using the text from the title font. Because I want to pull elements of the UI into the assets I decided on making the door handles double MM’s as a nod to the title of the game.

Alongside this I made some Alphas from some UI elements to then texture onto the walls and roof as detailing or wall paper.

The double M alpha was made to be used on the front door. The Ms representing the title of the game 'Murders at Moorecliffe', this was used for the final iteration of the door.

The reason for the door update, is that I felt the door was a bit lack luster. The colours were good, but it wasn't as elegant as the rest of the room was going to be.

Floor and roof textures imported into unity

When working on the top floor walls, I realised that the back feature wall didn’t flow well into the corner and then the side wall archs.

To help with this, I decided that instead of having the wall and corners separate, I would combine them into one so that I could texture the feature wallpaper right up to the edge.

The bottom floor texture of the ball room had bleeds, which looked really bad in game

To fix this I tried making a higher poly mesh, but still got the same bleed issue.

In the end I decided to separate the mesh, and make the marble floor raised and lay it on top of the wood floor. This eliminated the bleed, and make the end result more polished 

Re did the UVs to let some more assets get more detail. Split the current 3 UV sheets into 5

Feedback on the current textures in the build is that I need to merge the top floor walls due to how the texture looks.

Worked on improving the bake on the archway on the top floor, as it was coming through too chunky when baked.

I tried various UVs to get a good one, as some came out really messed up 

Finally settled on a good bake, which I then took the normal into photoshop to touch it up, and make the blend better.

After completing one piece, I duplicated and sewed it all to make one wall piece.

Used this to make the lightmap, and kept the original UVs stacked for the texture.

This solved the unity issue of having mesh seams on the top floor walls

Example of the texture seams.

June 11 - June 25

Updated the back wall texture, by creating a vector alpha in illustrator and then applying this in substance. This helped improve the grainy texture that was coming through

Helped Matt by texturing some of his assets to help speed up the process

Chandelier, wine glasses and the bar

Continued helping Matt texture

Updated the unity file to implement HDRP render pipeline.

We had a few issues getting this to update properly over collab.

Hazel’s fix was easy as she just needed to overwrite her push with mine, however Faye's got messed up somehow. This was fixed by….

Continued to texture more of Matts assets

Imported what I could into the scene, along with the exported textures.

The plan is to have everything in on Friday so we can bake the lighting over the weekend

Created a few assets for Hazel to use in some animation sequences 

Went over the HDR lighting and did a quick bake to see how some of the textures look.

Improvement is definitely needed. This will be done by refining the texture details in the inspector.

Due to time issues, and some assets not being completed I made some quick assets, and then found some on turbo squid to fill the upstairs space.

Couch found on turbo squid, which I reduced and baked a high onto.
Along side this found a plant model from CG trader

Created some quick bar stool and table leaners to fill some space.

To help with some texturing issues, we downloaded a substance plug in which allowed me to import SBAR files to the assign to assets. This was mostly used to texture the silk table cloths and floors, which significantly improved the look.

Due to some issues with the HDR lighting in the scene I was working on, Vijay suggested that we try import my prefab package into a new scene to bake the lighting. This changed the whole look of the game drastically, as the  old scene was clearly missing some settings.

I had some issues getting the HDR lighting to work on some objects.

The stairs and table setting textures weren't getting picked up by the lighting.

I went through and double checked everything was static. Double checked a light map was generated and the model had a light map (by opening the model in Maya)
This prompted me to check the unity forum to see if anyone had had a similar problem. All I found was (Link)
I talked to Faye and Hazel about what was in the blog post ands we all agreed a script was quite drastic.
As a last ditch effort I assigned a blank material to the stairs and Tables, and then re-exported and assigned the textures to it and that fixed the issue.

June 26 - July 10

Along side the new bake and the implementation of the substance plug in, it was clear that the textures were still lacking.

Some of the models hadn't been separated properly, so required me to export the models to Maya and separate them and apply textures separately. This allowed me to used SBAR textures for certain objects to push their quality.

The out sourced models have since been replaced by models made by Matt.

After receiving some feed back on some of the colours in the scene, we updated the table cloth and chairs.

Created a game trailer to put on our itch page

We also created an instagram account for this game, as a means to market this further as we all wish to continue working on the project in the future