Hello! Welcome to the first week of the second production sprint. After a few production setbacks, we were still able to round off the first production sprint well.

Art

This week the level as finally be adjusted with the new meshes and light setups. Drawing a clean line at the edges and some obstacles in the middle it has finally come to a possible gameplay level containing the tether.

Some objects have collision while others don’t. Not all of them are in need of collision. Moreover, the color materials for the assets have been adjusted a little bit. They have a small amount of emission so they can be easier spotted in the dark environment.

Also, some texures have already been created for the tree trunk and the rocks. Most of the other textures are still missing.

A few particles have been added to the level as well and adjusted if needed.

Another thing that was tried is adding the attack fx to the attack animation but as it hasn’t worked out well and that wasn’t currently in focus it was dropped and other things were in focus. Furthermore, the assets have been added to the ArtAssets level to showcase them all easily and clearly in one level.

Our characters finally have animations! I added animations for attacks, breaking the tether, knockback, death and idle. I also rigged the weapon to it, so our kids finally look like real fighters. Here’s some examples:

Also our enemy model is in the works, here’s a little sneak peak of this unfriendly looking fellow

Programming

On the programming side, we progressed on a variety of different smaller sections.
These include:

Adding some simple variety to the enemies; a heavy and light variation of the basic enemy.

Furthermore, working on the enemies’ interactions and movement. In specific here, the enemy gets stunned on hit, which then allows the player to knock them back. This is dynamically indicated through color change just like the charge up time. The enemies also slightly slow down when they start charging up their attack now.

Lastly for the enemies, we started on some slightly randomized movement so the enemies dont all clump up together, however were not able to fully implement it yet.

We also further expanded the UI for the players, such that includes the wave number they reached on the end screen and better indicate when the players can dash.

We also added some extra depth through making the player unable to move when they are attacking. This was done because otherwise the player is almost never in danger.

And to finish off, we reworked a lot of the wave spawner. We added the variations of the enemies which will randomly appear in enemy clusters each wave. We also added a function which makes sure the enemies won’t spawn right on top of the players.

Sound

For audio, I started the week off by completing the sound design of our last few sound effects. These were namely the enemy attack sfx, player hit sfx and enemy hit sfx. After these were done, I immediately started on the implementation process of our game audio. The first sound that I implemented was the background ambience, as this allows me to set up a sort of “sound bed” to accomodate the rest of the sound effects. after implementing a couple more player and tether sound effect one shots, and struggling with getting unreal engine c++ to work with me (yay), I went into our music system implementation. This system worked smoothly, but it soon became a challenge for me to iron out some intricacies. After spending a bit more time on it though, I was able to fix everything, and get the system to work the way I intended for it. You can find a screenshot of the music system metasound below. All in all, this week was a big learning experience for me and it was thoroughly enjoyed. I hope to see you again next week. Goodbye!