Howdy!

After weeks of working out concepts, prototypes and research, we finally got started on the game production! Last week we each gave ourselves some tasks and set some goals to work on during this week. With these in mind, our coders started to code and our artists started to artist. 

It's important that everyone in our team agrees and approves on everything we make. All the images below still need to be approved by the rest of the team, so these might still change after applying everyone's feedback.

blockout

When we went in production, all our prototypes and meshes were send straight to the trash bin. We started from a clean slate. This means we had to start at the beginning. So we started with the obvious being the blockout. Proportions, camera angles and basic materials are important to keep in mind while making the blockout, because this will be what our artists and programmers will use as a basis when making there meshes and code. Making this already gave everyone a good idea what the game will look and feel like.

Playfield

To play a game, a playfield is a pretty crucial element. As soon as the blockout was finished, we started working on the playfield. Our game is set in a Japanese noodle restaurant, on top of one of the dining tables. So we had to create a wooden table with a placemath made out of sticks on top of it. With our brand new artbible next to us, we started working on the table. Since we don't have any other meshes to use as style reference, it was quite hard to match the style with all the rules we set up in the artbible. But in the end, I think we ended on something looking quite well. For now we just used maya to create the meshes, and photoshop for the textures. But we might also throw our mesh into substance painter to make to textures look extra fine. 

RFX

In our game we use a lot of RFX to make the game more readable and understandable. So it only made sense that we started on the early on in the development.  This week we started working on the 2 most important ones: The spill RFX and the dash RFX. The spill RFX will be used to make clear when soup and noodles are being spilled. Drops of soup fly out of the bowl and land in a splash. This RFX was also important for our programmers, since they needed this animation to start working on the soup pickup mechanic. Some of the splashes on the ground the player will be able to pick up.

The second RFX is used to make clear when the player is dashing. Cartoony clouds appear behind the player to indicate he's running faster than usual. Both particles systems were created inside Unity. The particle below uses a temporary toon shader. Both particle systems still need to be tested and implemented into our game. So changes will most likely still be made.

Programming

Our programmers also had plenty to work on during the past week. They worked on the core mechanics of our game: moving and dashing. With movement also comes controls, so this was also a task to keep in mind when coding the movement. Movement might seem straight forward but is more challenging to code than you would think. Smooth gameplay with satisfying moves is a main goal after all.
Besides the movement, our programmers also worked on the dashing mechanic. Since this is the core mechanic of our game, starting on this in development week one is only logical. These mechanics are still in progress, demo gifs coming in next week!

Next Week

We just keep going! After applying our feedback to our tasks from this week, we will just move on to the next task. For this sprint we still have a solid list of more than 25 different tasks planned, so we definitely won't get bored. Some of the next tasks we might get into is the rotating middle, more RFX, the bumping and spilling mechanic and finishing our main character!

See y'all later!