General update

After a very welcome Easter break  we did not just sit still. We continued our work on this project dutifully so of course there are a bunch of features, art and sound into our playable build that you can download on this page!

The development is going according to schedule with only some minor delays but those were expected to happen of course. In the course of next week we will figure out those delays and make sure they will be available to you all soon!

Programming

This week we continued working on the main obstacles for the level. We also have started working on platforms. The abstraction was created for it: platform base class. Then we created an inherited class breakable platform. When the player steps on, after 2 sec the platform breaks into small pieces and player falls into water. Also we have created Boat pendulum which is inherited from Base pendulum class.Boat pendulum is created from two parts: static and dynamic part. Artists now are able to put any mesh for both parts and change the speed of movement.

We also implemented a bounce for when the player hits an obstacle. To allow for flexibility, we used math to calculate the trajectory beforehand so we can have more control over how long it takes and how far the player is thrown back. Furthermore the base functionality for pickups has also been done, allowing the player to pick up an item and store it. The pickup point can also respawn an item after a set amount of time. Unfortunately this took longer than expected and thus the throwing functionality has not been implemented yet.

There are different testing scene's so by pressing P or Escape you can easily swap between these scenes to test out the various newly implemented features!

Art

This week we made main obstacles for our main obstacle course. We modeled and texture Spinning Logs,The Boat Pendulum and Swinging Hammer obstacles. Taking into account chooses color palette, scales and art style.
We also made a Stylized SkyBox, which is simple blue gradient that makes level look more interesting and doesn't distract play during the gameplay. We modeled two new pick up items models- Beer Mug and Bottle and made sure they are easily visible on the level, also after testing one of the pick up item(axe) and getting feedback, we reworked it and made it the shape of the model wider. That significantly improved model visibility in the game level.

We started out making a watersplash texture in photoshop according to the low poly style, later we put it in unreal eningine and made a water splash particle with deforming the texture sprite and we also added water droplets. After this we made a drew a swirl and made it into a drunk particle. Next step was making an impact cloud particle, we modeled a high poly mesh in zbrush, we made it low poly and it was ready to be used in the niagara emitter. We made a particle colission mechanic on this impact effect. Finally we were not able to finish importing and applying the animations to the blockout model yet due to some unforseen issues, this week we will try to fix this since our character is one of our most important aspects in the game.

Sound

And last but not least we have our sound work. Since we only recently started production there was little to implement in the game yet but we have not been sitting idle on this department either.
Most time has gone to designing a lot of the sounds for the functionality that has been created this week and will be implemented in the course of next week. That doesn't mean nothing is audible yet.

The music and ambience are both audible in the game, the spinningwheel obstacle also has its sound in place already. Many things are ready to go into the game so stay tuned for next week because a lot of noise will be coming from our updated build next week!