Production phase - week 2

Programming

Button Mashing

An important mechanic that needed to be included was the recovery of the player whenever he fell in the water. This is so that the player has a chance of getting back into the game after falling of the ship into the water or getting knocked out of the ship. This was something discussed since the beginning of planning for the game, that when players fell through planks they would a life no matter what, but if they fell to the water they could "swim" to get back to the ship. This entails a button mashing mechanic where you need to beat an automatic timer going on in the background pressing the right face gamepad button as fast as possible.

Animations

We implemented some animations. For this we worked closely together with the art team. But from the programmers perpective this involved changing all of the static meshes to skeletal meshes, creating custom events so we could start an animation in the blueprint class and providing parameters to the blueprint like speed to control the playspeed of the walk animation. There is still a bug with the chest, because we changed the static mesh to a skeletal mesh the physics of the chest dont seem to work anymore.

Art

Animation

This week we sunk a lot of time into the implementation of the animations, and getting them all in the game in a correct way. This was accomplished using the animation blueprints and animation montage features in unreal. We managed to get the chest opening, walking, shooting and dash animations all working in game.

3D Art

Some additional models have been created that will be very likely implemented into the game soon!
The cannon-ball-gun! The kraken tentacle that would be pushing the pirates down from the ship & a seagull that will carry the chest and drop them down on the ship! 

Some of the HUD elements have been adjusted to a more stylized look and textured! (the text on the planks will be replaced by some font)

A scene for the ''character selection screen'' has been created. We will continue iterating on this before eventually implementing it into the game.

Materials

Good news! The gerstner waves are finally working, the material set-up is complete and we can now start making custom waves however we want to get a nice effect, here's a preview gif to showcase wave movement.

We've also continued working on our post process materials, the cell shader is now properly shading models and coupled with the outline material we get a nice stylized look.