Last week, out project was officially approved for production by our supervisors for the Game Project course!

So now our job is to transform our Game Design Document into a long list of tasks that will be carried out over three sprints (two production, one polish sprint)! We have already allocated tasks for this sprint last Tuesday, and have been steadily working away at making our project afresh, once again starting from a thoroughly empty Unreal project. (While our prototype certainly works, it was made in a hurry, and there are many quick-fixes, file redirects, messy loose files, and similar in that project folder; rather than try to fix all that, it is best to simply start fresh now that we have plenty of time to work).

Art: General Progress

Since we are starting over from a fresh project, Jens was the one to take on the task of rebuilding our museum level from scratch, with temporary assets to act as placeholders until the proper 3d models are made and imported. Meanwhile, the others are working on making the actual assets that we will be using, and Hendrik has been additionally working on implementing and refining the shader created during the prototyping phase.

Art: Shaders, Rigging, Modeling, brought to you by Hendrik Sapyn

This week, I’ve been finalizing the Toon Shader, with the last major hurdle being the outline effect, which I’ve now successfully restricted to specific objects. I’ve also been refining shader workflows by creating a quick and easy master material to streamline future development. On the art asset side, I’ve completed a pedestal and started working on a trash can. Additionally, I’ve been testing the rig for the beautiful character that Jens created, so I can hopefully start using Mixamo next week to bring the racoon to life.

Programming: General

While the artists work through the long list of assets they need to make, the programmers are busy with slowly and methodically rewriting all the code necessary to make the game possible - and doing so in an organised and tidy fashion, since we are no longer being harassed by soon-arriving deadlines for proving that our prototype is fun and functional.

Aslan is busy working on recreating the Guard AI in the new project, Sasha is recreating the player and loot objects - and the way they interact with one another -, and Hades is handling all the assorted UI screens and the controls for interacting with them, as well as minor things like the level timer and score updating and display.