Production phase - week 2

Programming

This week rather then making a lot of new content we focused on polishing the content we already have, and fixing some bugs. This also includes adding the animations, meshes and effects.

Movement

Even though we already had the movement for the character working, it still was very clunky to play since you could only move straight up down or diagonal. This also applied for the look direction of the character which is even more annoying when you want to shoot someone or dash. This week we fixed this and now you can look and move in all directions with a controller. The looking is also fuid now and even though you can still snap it on 45 degree angles, the charater will rotate as you rotate the right joystick.

Camera

In our game if we want to show the whole ship you would constantly have play zoomed out so what we did is made a camera that zooms out when a player is on the edge of the screen and zooms in when all of the players are in the middle of the screen. The zooming already worked last week however there was a terrible jittering when zooming out and the steps in which the camera zoomed out where fixed so if it had to move just a tiny bit it would move back in 1 frame resulting in shooking camera. This week we fixed all of the above issues and made the camera move in really fluid and dynamic manner. 

Chest spawner

Last week we added a chest manager that spawns chests with powerups in them. However the spawn position of the chests where fixed to the middle of the ship. This week we added a spawnpoint list to the manager that you can fill with targetpoints in the editor. The manager will chose one of the targetpoints and spawn the chest there.

Power Shot Pickup

A third pickup was added this week, which granted the player the ability to shoot a big cannonball as a projectile which if it hit another player, it would send it flying away from the ship, but the power shot also had a strong effect on the user itself. There were, various difficulties while developing this feature, one of them was trying to spawn the proper actor needed when the pickup was grabbed by the player, there were errors that would lead it to spawn something completely differen. However the true hustle of developing this mechanic was on getting the projecile to identify when it hit an actual player, at the end this was achieved the feature now works as inteded.

Art

Animations

This week we started creating some custom animations for the game. We started off by making the most important ones, namely the chest opening animation, the run animation, the shooting animation and the dash animation.

Models

Finally the most important model has been created! - The pirate ship!

&  some cute power-ups.

Shader

We wanted to further the cartoony-stylized look of our game and thus decided to try out a cell/toon shader material to get those nice black outlines on objects to really give it that "Straight from a cartoon" feeling.

With some dabbling inside the unreal material editor, finding references and some documentation on the matter we have our first iteration of the the material which can be fully customized using parameters for ease of use by both artists and non-artists.

Plans for the following week

Programming:

-Implementing all of the effects

-Implementing the animations

-Add the life system to have a nice game loop

Materials:

Further development on the cell shader material to improve its look

Developing Gerstner Waves  for the water material