This week we have more prototypes:

Art:

For this week we have started on our artbible while still prototyping and testing things out.

We settled on our environment/arena setting to be a more outdoors factory harbor with a general  morning-noon lighting.

A big focus was on getting our shaders to work and look right having a more unique feeling. With our new environment came the need for a water shader for our characters to fall into.  This general prototype ended up working nicely with a bunch of  possible parameter options to adjust it to our style as we need. 

Again, regarding the general style of the game, we had to test some stuff out to see what works and what not. On top of that we knew that we have limited amount of time, thus the approach we take should be as flexible and fast as possible. We ended up creating some proxy meshes, quickly unwrapping and baking some maps in Substance Painter which could be used to highlight colors and mood of out cartoony style. On top of that we threw some additional shaders in Unity such as cell , gradient and custom outline shaders. 

The character is still a bit more ambiguous, inspired by simple (toy) robots to fit the production theme while also being more forgiving when made out of all rigid bodies in the ragdoll. It was easier to visualize the characters in the polygon style by going straight into 3d with reference looking for a interesting shape design while keeping in mind the simplicity we'd want for our active ragdolls while still having it fit with the artstyle.  

Lastly we went through some free assets packs to look at different props and fx see what we like, shape our style more and to maybe have ready to use in a demo.

Sound:

This week I have been thinking about the music. The main point have been able to come up with is that the music should of course match the style and feel of the game. So it cannot be dramatic or atmospheric, we are probably looking for something upbeat. the second point is that the role of the music is to fill up the soundscape and add a bit of mood (in game, not in the menus). That being said, the music will thus be in the background around the same volume level or even less than the ambience.

Game Prototypes:

The camera is a multitarget camera that always tries to fit all the characters in the same frame. Since the games arena is not going to be too large the camera should never be zoomed out too much. The way the implementation is currently works is that it zooms by manipulating the fov which means it basically only zooms horizontal. This is not perfect but depending on the way the levels are designed it might not even reveal itself as a Problem. 

The first throwing implementation is prototyped but still not perfect. When the player is carrying a throwable object while it is affected by the physics system it also introduces new weight to the active ragdoll which would make the character fall into the direction of the throwable object. Now we basically attach the physics iimplementation as soon as we throw the Object which makes it heavier on the processing time but we are working on a cleaner implementation for the release version. 

This is just a platform that makes the environment a bit more interactive a platform that you can cross to the other side.

You now can pick up items with the letter G. When you pick up an item you hold that item until you throw it with the letter F.  The item will always be in front of the player. It will also be the direction the object gets thrown in.

In the newest build the player can walk around pick up items and throw them at dummies