Week04 - Production Sprint 1

4 years ago by fabs2000

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PRODUCTION PHASE

Programming

Now that we've gotten green lit for the production phase we've been planning about what was the most important thing to get done now that we were at this stage. The main agreement we came to is to start remaking mechanics made in prototyping the "proper" way if you will. This means that we were going to separate different mechanics that were previously all together in one C++ class (such as movement and shooting) into components such as to make the project more maintainable and understandable. Besides this, previously used methods used for out mechanics have been eliminated and replaced with newer and better ways of doing them.

Core Changes

Before, the respawning of the player was implemented rather quickly due to time constraints and all the logic done inside the same player class, this is not correct for a production phase. Now, whenever players fall into the ocean, a trigger box is set there so that it can reset its position to a specific point on top of the ship and changing its velocity so that its movement now looks okay. Regarding the player weapon, this is now a separate component to the player class itself such as to keep a clean structure within our code. The shooting range was changed, shortened and had an effect added to it for visual feedback instead of a debug box. Finally, after feedback from people, we changed the way our characters turn, instead of using only the x-axis of our gamepads, we will use all of its axis such as that wherever you point.

Tile Array (Updated)

After starting the tile array last week, working on it some more, it is now a finished mechanic included in the most recent build of the game. It now displays a decal showing which tile is the one going to be deleted such as the players have time to react to this. The customizable features for this tile class are the amount of tiles, the time span of disappearing tiles, the model for the tiles and the decal used to warn the player.

Ship Rocking(Not fixed as of yet)

After finding the bug of our characters getting launched too far when the movement of the ship happened, we started to look into why this could be, we determined that this might be due to the fact that when the ship is updating its position, in a certain frame, it might have the character inside of it and the physics update for the character launching due to the shooting has not happened yet.
This would cause it to fly off indeed if the force of impulse is applied to the character while inside the ship model, causing errors in the calculation of the proper velocity. However, we did not manage the time to fix this issue and has been left as a task for next week.

Plans for the following week

- Fix ship rocking bugs finally

- Implement power ups

- Life system with a win state if one player remains alive.

Art

In this first production week, we all got into working out a bunch of the stuff we already planned out during the prototyping phase. We devided everything in tasks and assigned them to the different team members. This week we mostly focused on the ship model, some props, some effects, the water shader and UI elements.

RFX

Following the experimenting of how we would tackle different effects, we picked the best and easiest method and started making some good looking effects. We created a fire effect for when cannonballs hit, some smoke for impacts of various objects and a first version of the primary fire effect that will play every time the player fires their weapon.

3D Models for game UI

We opted for a UI using 3D Models of planks and other (pirate) ship themed/related object(Steer, compass, etc).
Currently we have an early version of the models that will be used for the UI, they aren't textured yet but they should serve as an example of what we are aiming for.

3D Models

We primarily worked on the ship and it's collision, and some barrels and boxes. These were most important for the gameplay elements so we tackled these first. We also created some vegetation and rock for the start screen and character select screen. A basemesh for the characters was also created.