You may have noticed the absence of the devlog updates during the last two Monday. Never fear! We were simply taking advantage of the spring holidays to rest and recharge, and now we are back with fresh updates and a lot of progress as we come to the end of our first production sprint.

Art: General Progress

We continued refining the lighting, aiming for a brighter overall scene and a more balanced distribution of warm light sources. The main technical improvement was the addition of an invisible roof that interacts with lighting—this allows moonlight to be blocked throughout the space except for the central area, where windows let it in naturally. We also worked on improving the placement of interactable elements - pedestals where the loot spawns during the game were positioned to support both gameplay flow and visual balance. We have also finally implemented automatic player color assignment—each player now has a unique color that appears as a circle beneath their character and is also applied to their mask for easier identification Finally, we added a couple of small but fun animation updates: the raccoon now has distinct win and lose animations!

On the technical side of constructing the museum, the block-out of the mesh museum was replaced with a properly modelled and unwrapped mesh, which is now textured, and features some extra details like doors that were not there before - so the guard can finally throw the raccoons out of the museum and not just at the wall. As many parts of the mesh are identical - walls only vary in length, and so on - we have made use of a trimsheet to minimise the number of unique materials needed for the environment.

In some visual effects news: we have started to build up the effects signalling that the timer is reaching its end, starting with police lights that appear along the edges of the screen. We have also designed several other effects for things that happen repeatedly during the game: item collection, item respawning, and others. We have also added in the progression bars for showing throw charge-up progress, stamina recharge after dashing, and Tug-Of-War progress.

Programming: General Progress

There has been a lot of work in every area of the game in terms of programming.

For starters, our Guard AI is now fully implemented with all its behaviours - patrolling, searching, chasing the raccoons, picking them up and tossing them out of the museum, getting dazed when hit with an object, going into Rage Mode when dazed too many times (Rage Mode renders the guard immune to being dazed, and makes it faster). Also, there is now a visual indicator of where the guard is looking, so players can avoid it more easily - lest they get hit with the guard's flashlight, become dazed, and then get thrown out of the museum. And all of this is now accompanied by the correct animations!

We have also finished implementing the multiplayer system, with the number of players that spawn in the game now matching the number of players that register in the lobby - and the controls in the main menu, lobby, and end menu are now all correctly responding to the input of all the connected controllers (and the game can be easily restarted after the timer rounds out, as previously there was not an end menu allowing to start the game over, return to main menu, or straight up quit the game).

Loot now spawns dynamically in the level, both at the start, and when items are collected or otherwise removed from their spots. We have also built the base of the system for randomly spawning items in a range of different values, weight, and appearances, so it is not all just cubes any more.

Players are now able to dash. and the ability has a cooldown visualised by a progress bar that appears beneath the player, and disappears when the cooldown ends.

The UI elements indicating the Tug Of War progress now use player colours in the progress bar, to make it clear what is happening.