Good evening,

The extra testing paid off we now have a much more fleshed out prototype and are ready to dive into production. We'll use this blog to document our first two weeks of production. Since we spent an extra week on testing / prototyping we agreed to get some extra work done during spring break!

During the first week of production we made a more accurate block-out of the scene we had during the prototype and used it to paint / concept our first environment pass:

using this information we got to work modeling modular assets that will later be used to build the environment. Below you can see the assets in a separate scene, this will become much more clear once we get to baking / painting them (which should happen in our next production sprint)

We also have an early version of the piñata paper covered bomb and rocket. We used Maya's MASH system to cover our base mesh with planes all around and in the proper direction. We wanted to create a layered effect the same way a piñata is layered in paper. As a stretch goal we would like to animate the papers to make it look like they are moving in the wind.

The character model has also been finished and is ready for texturing and animating! The early concepting paid of and gave us a nice base to model our character from. All in all I think he is turning out to be quite the handsome fellow wouldn't you think? Cant wait to see this guy alive and running in the game, so that we can blow him up with bombs and rockets :)

(Slightly improved character sketch)

Animating the character went pretty smooth with the help of Mixamo. For some animations like the holding of the bomb and the throwing we had to tweak the animations in Maya. We chose to separate the top and bottom part of the mesh when exporting the animation so that when we use our twinstick controls the legs and the torso can move independently. Here are some samples of the animations.

On the programmers' side things progressed a bit more slowly. Learning from our mistakes in the prototype, we're now building the managers of our game with flexibility and ease of expansion in mind. We've analyzed our pitfalls during the extra week of prototyping and can now build what we need accordingly.

The most infuriating bug we had, namely the weird spawning of the players, was one that got fixed with **ONE** line of code. As is tradition with code and bugs, I guess...

Other than that, the main thing we're trying to avoid with our game manager and all related scripts is having multiple points of reference for any and all important objects in the game.

Before, in the prototype, we had multiple scripts that we could access to e.g. reference the player that has the bomb. The issue was that these scripts only updated their "player who has the bomb" variable inconsistent to the actual reality of the game. So when using these scripts to do anything of importance we would run into "weird" bugs that were not easily solvable without a general rewrite.

I think we learned from our mistakes (hopefully) :D

- Group 9