This week, we have been busy combining all our various ideas and prototypes into one big prototype featuring all the basic features we want in our game. We have also finished our Art Bible, Tech Document, and Game Design Document as we prepare to move into the production phase in the coming week.

Art

Our artists have been hard at work over the past week, making great strides in shaping the visual identity of the game. We’ve made significant progress on our design document in HacknPlan, with all the artist's contributions now integrated. This includes various visual references and images to aid with better visualization of our ideas. The document also outlines the key tasks and subtasks, ensuring we're all aligned as we move forward.

A major focus has been refining the Art Bible. We’ve made final tweaks to the color palette, ensuring consistency across all assets. The main character's shape language is now well defined, contributing to a more cohesive visual style. Additionally, we’ve continued working on the environment art—further refining shapes, proportions, and references for a more immersive world.

We’ve also finalized the night lighting, both indoors and outdoors, creating the perfect atmosphere for various scenes. Along with this, the camera layout has been fine-tuned to optimize the player’s perspective and interaction.

Our work on the UI and HUD (including the main menu, pause screen, and end screen) is also progressing smoothly, as discussed in the design document. Everything is coming together nicely, and we’re excited about the direction we’re heading in!

Art: Shader Update, brought to you by Hendrik Sapyn

This week, I’ve made some exciting progress on the Toon shader! I’ve added an outline effect to the cell shader, giving it a more cartoon-like appearance. One of the key improvements is the ability to control where the outline appears—using a custom stencil, we can now specify which objects will have the outline, adding more control and polish to the visual style. I’ve also integrated this shader into the main prototype, along with the animations we’ve been working on. Now, I’m testing how everything looks from the camera angle we finalized last week to make sure the visuals come together cohesively.

Programming

The programmers have also been quite busy: in the process of putting all the key mechanics in one Unreal project, we have finished implementing and adding in object throwing, a tug of war for players who are both trying to get the same object, the NPC guard that chases the players around if it sees them, pickup zones for the loot so the game can give scores to players, and a timer so the game can actually end and a winner can be determined.