The second week of production has come and gone, and brought with it plenty of progress.

Art: General Progress

Our highest priority for the assets are currently 3D models for all the objects in the world, and the animations for the raccoons and guard. Over the last week, our stylised art specialist Jens made the character models, and Hendrik is now working through all the animations that need to be created; and while they are busy with that, Michał has been working through the list of valuables on display in the museum and fully reworking the indicators for both the players and their collection areas.

Characters modeling and texturing

This week, Jens focused on finalizing the player and enemy characters, as they were essential for the next stages of development. Other team members needed these models to continue their work, so getting them ready was a priority.

He started with the player character, a raccoon thief. To speed up the process, a free model was used as a base, and then modified in Maya to fit our needs and the game's style: it needed modifications in proportions, general shapes, then it had to be retopologised for better animation, and have gloves and mask added to it. Once that was done, it needed to go through UV unwrapping, get rig-tested in Mixamo to ensure everything was set up right for making a proper rig and animations later, and last - but not least - it had to be textured in Substance Painter.

Since our game supports four players, each raccoon needs to have something to make it clearly different from the others: we chose colour-coded gear. But instead of creating separate textures, we  used a material instance in Unreal Engine that allows the gloves and mask colors to change for each player, while keeping the base texture the same for all of the raccoons.

Once the raccoon was complete, it was time for the enemy museum guard. It was modeled in Maya, using the design from the art bible as a reference, and used the same workflow as previously: modeling, UV unwrapping, and testing the mesh with a basic rig to check deformations. Once the guard's model was modeled and rigged,  it was textured in Substance Painter.

Character Animations

After completing the character models, we started with the animation process using Mixamo, beginning with a simple skinning test animation. We used Mixamo’s auto-rigging tool to rig both characters and then exported them to Maya for weight adjustments. For the raccoon's tail, it needed to be re-weighted it to the spine joint, as Mixamo didn’t treat the tail rig the way we needed, and there were also issues under the armpits and stomach for both characters that required fixing.

Once the skinning adjustments were complete, we re-imported the models into Mixamo to apply more suitable animations. If any issues arose, we repeated the skinning steps. Next, we focused on finding the right animations for the game and importing them into Unreal Engine. With the animations set, the programmers were able to integrate them into the blueprint for implementation.

Props Modeling

Additionally, we created the mesh for the raccoons’ spawn point — a trashcan with a color-specific trash bag corresponding to the player’s character. This will serve as the location where the raccoons appear in the game.

Programming: General

In the meanwhile, the programmers are also steadily working on their tasks. The tug of war with loot, dazing players by throwing things very hard at them, large objects slowing the player down, item pick up and throwing, and loot drop off zones (and increasing player scores when an item gets collected from the zone) are now all working in the game level. On top of that, there is now a start screen that takes players to a lobby, where players can see if their controllers are connected, and press a button to indicate that they are ready to play - and when all connected players are ready, the game starts, with the number of spawned player characters being limited to the number of people who were in the lobby.

The guard ian already do basic patrolling, detection, and chasing - next, the capture ability will be implemented, and then all the behaviors will be integrated together so the guard can switch smoothly between them as required.