Week05 - Production sprint 1

4 years ago by JefSimons

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Production phase - week 2

Programming

Camera

When making the custom camera for the game, the approach to take was that it could zoom in and out depending on the position of characters to give the game a more dynamic feel. The camera was meant to follow the ships rotation slightly as well to have more player feedback. However as the development went on, several hurdles arrived, for instance, there were cases where in the camera class it wouldn't recognize that there should be 4 (or however many the game has) players and would only include one, leaving the only player able to trigger camera movement front and back to the be the first player. This was not intended and delayed the development of the camera for quite a while until we figured out what needed to happend for the camera to know the correct amount of players. Later, some problems were presenting themselves when transforming the coordinates in worldspace of the players to screenspace, as some players position were defaulted to 0,0. This was because when setting the view target of the player, multiple players cannot own the same view target, thus the first player that has its view target assigned is the one that knows what is the correct viewport to use. This finally solved the many issues while developping the camera, and while not yet complete, it's very much more near to be done.

Power-Ups

When developping the power ups, our first approach was to create a chest manager since chests are the places where the powerups will spawn. The chest manager's function is to spawn chests that drop out of the sky at certain intervals, these chests can be opened by the player when they are close to it. After the chest is opened it gets destroyed and spawns a random powerup which the player can walk over and pick up from the ground. For the moment only one powerup was implemented due to time constraints and certain hurdles that paused the developmenet of this feature a while. A certain hurdle was that the chest manager was made intially as a scene component, after discovering what a scene component truly does, it was changed to an actor given that this way its information and data could be accessed from other classes that needed it.The powerup included is meant to be a bottle of rum which invert your controls to simulate the effects of being a drunk pirate on a rocking ship. The powerup can not only invert your controls but also grant you twice the shooting power, to blast players further away, so it's a powerup that works both ways, against you and in your favor.

Plans for the following week

Finish camera implementation
Finish powerups
Use finished art assets in game
Possibly start the life system implementation

Art

During this second week of production, we just continued working on our assigned tasks. But before we did this, we first fixed up our perforce depot and made sure everything was situated and named correctly. We also made sure we uploaded everything we created the week before that was still missing on the depot. After all that annoying stuff was taken care of, we started working on the fun stuff again!

RFX

Some of the effects made in the previous week were given some extra attention. After this was done, some more RFX were created this week. namely the cannonball impact, for when a tile is destroyed. This was done quite efficiently, by reusing the smoke and fire, and then creating some custom debris and a flying cannonball. A simple smoke particle was also created for when the characters run around. These little smoke puffs will trail behind characters when they move around. Finally, two status effects where also created, one for the rum (drunk) power-up, and one for the speed power-up.

3D Models

Finally ALL playable characters have been modeled and textured.
The base shapes were blocked out in Zbrush first, followed by a retopo in 3DCoat. In the end some final adjustments were done on the meshes in 3dsMax. Additionally the weapon for the characters got created following the same process.

For the textures the 'lazy-unwrap-gradient' workflow was applied which is very time efficient and allows us to tweak colors on the fly.

Now they're ready to get rigged, skinned and animated!

Also the model for the chest that will hold the power-ups got created!

HUD and Post-Game models

A number of models for the HUD and post-game screen have been made, and are being textured using the above 'lazy-unwrap-gradient' workflow in order to save time and still achieve a nice looking result.

These will be rigged so that we can add some nice little animations to them and further immersion with the game.

The base steering wheel (character icons) for the in-game HUD got adjusted to a more stylized look and the heads of the playable characters have been added.