Hi,

We haven't posted for 2 weeks now because we were on easterbreak.

Now we are back in full swing though!

The past week the artists spent their time on modelling and texturing the main character and all sorts of props to serve as buildingblocks for the castle environment.

Mauro finished the character model and its unwrap even with some Maya crashes. Also the character textures were finished in Substance Painter . He created different color variations with changes in the metal, leather and gradients to get some nice results and give our little robot some nice fashion choices.

He also started with the model of the mighty shortsword in Maya. And used Substance Designer for the first time to create the sand for the battle arena, with the help of some handy tutorials.

Joan spent their time on the Void Water Shader because the Brick Variations and Plank Variations for the Castle were not done yet. It took a lot of time because she first tried to make the Texture with Substance Designer, which she never touched. Due to that it took too much time to make the texture she started to make a material with some placeholder Textures found online. 

After the Material was done with the Placeholder Textures she worked on making them herself and the adjust all Parameter.  Some time before she started to make the Material she also made like a Base Mesh from the castle and ground out of the Blockout. This is to make the placement of the Bricks easier. 

Felicia made tiles for the game arena floor. She made stone tiles of three different sizes, 100 x 100, 100 x 50 and 50 x 50. There are two different versions of each size, to minimise a tiling and repeating look. The stone tiles were then textured in our Substance Painter template to keep the overall look of the game, with grunge maps added to get that subtle stone look. At first it was planned to make three different base color versions, one pinkish, one blueish, and one greenish, but from team feedback Felicia tried making the base color so a color parameter could be overlaid in an Unreal material, using an Overlay blend node.

Results:

Bram made a lot of plankvariations. He also made a ropemesh to add some visual interest incase we want to vary more than just size. He also spent some time modelling brick variations and setting up a vertexoffsetmaterial for the waving flag on the spinningballtrap.

For programming, this week we mainly made progress on implementing the camera follow system, where the camera keeps every alive player in focus, and zooms in and out to maintain this.

Wout mainly focussed on the camera. This camera is used to see all the players in the level and zooms in and out accordingly so you only see the necessary part of the level. 

Besides the camera he also started working on the death logic which is for now triggered by the water alone. When the character dies he isn't able to move any longer and the character won't collide with the other players anymore so the other characters can' t be blocked by a body. 

Lastly he added the character models to the mauro made to the game as the playable character.

Meanwhile Ward did further mapping of the controls but for keyboard, so game is playable with controller and/or keyboard.

Also added a volume that detects when items and objects touch it / go through it. This volume will act as a killing box, and will kill all players that interact with it. Items that fall in here will be unable to be picked up again / disabled.

Lastly a healthcomponent was created to keep track of the health for each limb, this component will later on communicate to be able to detect when to cut of a limb, to display in the hud how much hp every limb has and kill the player by firing OnDeath when the head is cut off.

Thanks for reading!

Hope to see you here again next week.