Art

Welcome to the art part of the devlog! You might notice our game environment has vastly changed this week. We decided to introduce different height levels to shake up the gameplay, so I made some new scary spikey looking plateaus to climb up on and even a special area that will be our graveyard. It’s important to closely work with the devs, since the new height levels also introduced issues with the navmesh we used to use.

We also decided it would be neat to have shrines that can heal you as an incentive to move around the map more, so I got to work on making a model for those too. You can soon look forward to one of these being a saving grace for your playthrough.

Also, we have created a basic layout of the heights in the level. Those heights add some more volume to the game and makes walking around a little more interesting than simply walking around on a flat plane. To reach the next height the player can use ramps that are placed conveniently. (I forgot to make a screenshot of the base layout :( )

Furthermore a few more assets have been created and downloaded to create a more interesting environment. With those asset a small graveyard was created that can be explored by the player. More of that will follow! Not only has the graveyard been created with assets but it has also gotten a bit more lighter so that the player notice it more quickly. But not too much, we want to keep the scary and mysterious atmosphere yet.

Another thing that has been changed are the asset textures and therefore the material for those. New stylized textures have been looked for and found and made a material of. Not all of them have been added yet but the textures are almost ready to go and be added!

Another thing that was fixed was the UV of the ground. Adding different heights to the level messed up the UVs and make them unequal, also for the ramps. Those have been fixed in Unreal so that a material can easily be applied to those meshes without every plane looking differently or broken.

Programming

This week for our programming section, we worked closely together with our artists to further implement animations and effects.
We also further expanded the outline for our UI, completely ready for the art additions in the last week (next week).
Since we added extra layers to our map, we also adapted the navmesh, to work better with this. Furthermore, we had to adjust the enemy movement to work well with the height variety, since previous to now the game-space was all flat, the enemy movement sometimes made them end up wanting to be on the top of the walls while the players were below.
Lastly, we further developed the enemy movement to be ready for the last week functionality wise, it now calculates a rough position between the players where it will try to knock them apart from, and next week we will implement the system where they do the knocking.

Sound

Hello! It’s the second week of sprint 2, which means a new week of audio goodies to enjoy! This week, time was mostly spent on implementing metasound in our game. I started off by getting the tether radiance working, which has a special interaction with the different tether states. The tether radiance has a pitch variation based on the colour and thus it’s degree of connection or disconnection. In the end, I managed to get it working, and the results are pretty cool! After that, I went over to the implementation of different player and enemy sound effect, mainly covering combat based sound like attacking and dying. Since we have player animations in the game now, I was able to implement some animation based sound effects now, such as player footsteps and player attacking. Throughout the week, I also made sure to put some time aside for mixing, which is an incredibly important aspect of game audio. You can see the tether radiance metasound below! that’s it for me this week. Hope to see you again!