PROTOTYPING PHASE

Programming

After the previous week's meeting, we had our work cut out for us. The primary goal of this phase was to get a good prototype of the game, with multiplayer and most importantly fun game-play.

Core mechanics

We worked on some more mechanics, like the rocking of the ship. A prototype of this was created and tweaked to get it working fine. 

Another important feature that we worked on was the array of Tiles of which the ship will consist of.

Rocking of the ship

The main difficulty here was to give realism to the rocking of the ship. We did this by changing the angle of root of the blueprint class with a sinus function and the height difference with a cosine function. This looked surprisingly realistic. The rocking of the ship is an actor component. If you just add the component to your blueprint class everything in the class will rock around the root so its really easy to edit in the blueprint class editor. We have complete control over the magnitude of the rotation, translation(up and down) and time it takes to complete 1 cycle.

Tile Array

The main difficulty was to store the different tiles in an array, this took a lot of time while it is actually pretty simple. The tile array is an actor component that takes all of Tile actors of the blueprint class and puts it in an array. After some time the tiles get randomly disabled(a cannonball destroys the tile) so you can fall in the hole. The goal is to make it visible for the player when a tile is going to disappear with a red cross so the player can anticipate.

Character class changes

Now the player is able to shoot another player. The shoot-rate is limited. Diagonal movement with the controllers. 

Multiplayer

You can now play with minimum 2 players with controllers. If you get knocked of the ship you will respawn (drop from the air).

Plans for the following week

- Finish including the tile array into  the playable build.

- Fix issues with the rocking of the ship when launching characters

- Separate different mechanics  that were previously implemented solely within the chracter in order to have a better structured and maintainable code.

Art

Meanwhile, the art team spent a lot of time figuring out some technical aspects of the shaders and effects. We spent some time creating prototype materials and particles. We also finished up the art bible and created loads of concept art and some early models.

Art Bible

Last tweaks and changes to the Art bible were made to get it up to snuff. We also fixed some of the issues our leads pointed out during last week's meeting. Finally, we packaged everything in a PDF file for easy readability

Concepts

More detailed concept drawings were created during this week, for the ship and the weapons for the characters.

RFX

We did more research into the style and setup of the shaders and particle systems. Prototype versions of smoke and fire were made as a basis for all other particles. We used a combination of mesh based and sprite based particles. During production we will iterate and adapt these particles to our needs.

Water Shader

We created a prototype water shader, complete with waves based on Gerstner Waves (a mathematic formula). This combined with bright colors and foam textures gave us a really nice stylized look for the water surface.

General

The Art team also focused a little bit on general stuff. We  created an Art asset list, listing all the different assets that will need to be created. We took a good look at our naming conventions, and decided on a setup that would work best for us. Finally we also created a Game design model on hack'n'plan to give everyone a clear view of what needed to be done and how everything would fit together.

Plans for the following week 

-creating the first fully finished models

-further iterations on effects and shaders

-creating some props