Good evening,

This week we finally have a centerpiece to tie the whole arena together. And no Dia de Los Muertos would be complete without a proper ofrenda. An ofrenda is an altar where an offering is placed in a home to commemorate relatives or friends who have passed. The picture of the deceased is placed on the altar together with something that said person enjoyed in life, perhaps a some food, some drink or smokes. This colorful altar to us is a beautiful way to remember who were with us, and celebrate who we are still with. 

Who is that standing in the middle of the ofrenda you ask? Well that would be Santa Muerte, a holy figure of death. She is often found in the decoration of the day of the dead. 

We wanted to make an ofranda that was respectful to the culture, but playful enough to fit our artstyle. It was definitely and interesting design process :)

This week we did a first set dressing and lighting pass. We also made a night scene variation, we really like the mood of the night scene but visibility could become an issue. We'll have both levels tested and then decide which one to go forward with.

Some changes were also made to our modeling pipeline, we decided to model in chamfers to round off the assets instead of including a high poly baking pass. While we had to modify and re-unwrap the current modular assets, it will save us time in the long run.

More shaders have also been added as well as a placeholder explosion fx, both materials and fx will be expanded upon in the coming weeks.

We the programmers kept working on the game mechanics as promised! We're back with the bomb magnetism, bounciness and explosion fx we all have come to adore during the few weeks of prototyping.

To add to that lineup we added an initial navmesh - a special mesh that will allow AI agents to walk around our level without trying to phase through walls - but our efforts fell flat. The navmesh we generated based on the colliders in our scene either clipped through some of the level or even had holes in it! It looked unusable, if we're a bit honest. 
No worries though, tweaking a bit of the generation settings resulted in a more uniform navmesh that is probably usable, but still clips through some of the props in the level :p

That's all for sprint 1, see you in the next one!

- Group 9