Good Evening,

The Mechanics, Art direction and Technical details have all been laid out. 

Have a sneak peak at our latest prototype:

As well as finishing all the necessary documentation, we still had some prototyping to do:

We tried out the new FX system (visual effects graph) to see if it would serve us better than the build-in shuriken system. While we ran into some issues setting it up but most of that is solved now. The new system allows for far more complex particle systems (close to what Niagara is for Unreal engine). The only downside is that you can only have preset colliders. Not having full collision with the rest of the scene is a bummer but having a complex and impactful effect for the bomb explosion is more important. so we'll stick to the new system for now.

Specialty shaders, in addition to the vertex painting from last week we have now set up a custom rendering feature to make our characters show up as a ghosted effect whenever their being obstructed by the environment:

Also added a small but neat shader feature for the bomb, it will glow bright red when nearing the end of the timer.

In addition we where also trying to figure out the best way that we are going to do our animations. 

Fist of we went to see if Mixamo would correctly be able to rig and animate our chibi proportioned chacacters. If so we would save quite some time. Luckily for us it worked! Our little blockout guy was up and runnin.

Next up was exporting our animated character to Unity (which wasn't all that difficult thankfully). Just a drag and drop and its in your game.

Lastly we altered the running animation we got from Mixamo in Maya, where the character is holding up his arms. We would use this for when a player is running around while holding the bomb.

Initially we wanted to split the character up in an animated upper and lower body, so that we could rotate the upper and lower body separately corresponding to the twin stick controls we want to implement. But so far we haven't been able to correctly export an animated rig that was surgically sliced in half :) We will definitely keep researching  this as we're entering the production phase.

Regarding the Developers' side of things:

We worked mainly on player feedback to make things more clear to the players. This includes things like implementing the animations and having them play correctly, rumbling the controllers in accordance to the time that's left before the bomb explodes and updating the bomb's shader properties to make it clear that the bomb is close to exploding.

Gameplay-wise we worked on a "magnetism" system that will make the aiming aspect of our game easier while also forcing all players to keep moving if they don't want to be the target of the bomb. 

This system will remember the last point where the player stood still and assign each player a magnetism value and a radius where the magnetism takes effect. The magnetism value is calculated in a way that it will decrease when the distance to the last point increases. Each time the player stands still, their reference point will update to the player's position.

This implementation still needs work to make it more robust, as there are ways to bypass the system to keep your magnetism level low throughout the game. An example would be to just move as far as you can from your reference point and keep moving in that general area. This will prevent your reference point from updating and keep the magnetism value at its lowest.

A possible solution to this problem could be to update the reference point's position on a fixed time interval. This way a player can't stay in any point for more than that time interval or else their magnetism value will shoot up.

Thanks for reading this far :D

Here are a few things you can expect by next week:

Finalized concepts for our Character, Arena and Exploding Pinata!