Making and integrating new meshes, animations, UI art, and more - this last week has been a productive and busy time for us! We've even had enough time to add two new features into the game: lasers and cameras, running into which will alert the guard and make him come over to investigate your location.

General: Art

Several missing raccoon animations were added, including a custom throw animation we created in Maya due to Mixamo’s lack of suitable options. We also implemented new animations for the raccoon emerging from a trashcan, complemented by a fun VFX fountain of trash—building on last week's trashcan animation work. 

We created a new stylized material that better aligns with the overall art direction of the game, as well a new material set to support the loot value system—featuring gold, bronze, and silver materials to match the most/medium/least expensive loot.

We've been working on adding more detail and life to the environment as whole. We created several new loot and decorative items, including a Viking helmet, new trophies, gems, a bust, a shield, a sword, security cameras, and lasers. These have been placed around the entire museum - but the most focus for the new decorative items have been the racoon spawn / loot drop off zones, which got a makeover in this last week. We decorated them with stylized assets like shelves, lockers, cardboard boxes, crates, and posters—some of which include subtle story elements woven into them. 

As part of building up our game's UI, we worked on the tutorial for the game - it can be viewed from the main menu, or opened up in the pause menu for whenever the players need to check information about the game. It consists of four pages of the most important information for the players about the chore mechanics of the game. We designed these pages in Photoshop, styled like blueprints being held by one of the raccoons—almost as if they're planning the heist by reviewing these sketches. The work on the UI is still not done - we are still planning on adding a playful score update animation using a cartoon-style text balloon to enhance feedback and player engagement, and the end game UI has not been implemented yet.

A new end screen scene has been implemented, where players' scores are tallied and they rise on pedestals based on their performance. The scene also reveals the secret room where the raccoons store all the stolen museum items, adding a narrative touch to the scoring. We updated the level’s lighting to better highlight loot, improving visual clarity and emphasis on objectives.

Lastly, we built the lobby where players wait for each other before the game begins. We wanted this space to fit into the game's story, so we designed a line-up room where the raccoons are shown under spotlights inside a jail setting. When a player joins the game, their raccoon's spotlight turns on, and when a player presses a button to show they are ready to play, the racoon starts dancing.

General: Programming

This week, the programmers were busy connecting all the new assets and animations and user interface art to all the programming scaffolding that was build up earlier - so now, not only do all the assets exist, but they exist in the game, and act as they should. Main Menu, Lobby, HUD, Pause menu are all navigable using a controller and show off all the things the artists made.

The Guard AI is now fully finished, and responds to the newly added Cameras and Lasers that randomly activate throughout the museum which both alert the guard whenever a Raccoon comes into a camera's spotlight or runs through a laser trap.

At long last, we have also added the Fragile Items mechanic into the game - certain pieces of loot are now more fragile than their fellows, and will break if you throw them too hard! Combined with the fully fleshed out random item spawning system, the game will now dynamically spawn an assortment of different loot (paintings, regular items, fragile items) whenever enough items get successfully stolen or destroyed - so now the map will never lack things for players to steal.

We have also started working on putting sound in the game - although there are no sound effects in this build yet, the underlying system is done and ready to be used!