ALL FISHERMEN ABOARD!! 

Welcome to our third devlog of our little game and may the tides be kind and the catch plentiful.

This week the tides have been as turbulent and unruly as ever. With our voyage venturing further and further into uncharted waters there have been some unexpected storms hitting our ship (Unity has been throwing some hands). Nevertheless, the adventure carries on, we persist and carry on further. We keep on testing out and improving upon new rods, nets, baits  (we have been throwing hands at prototyping some more). 

Now then without further ado let's look at this week's spoils of the sea:

Coding

Scene prototyping

This week we assembled our prototype scene. We made it so we can dynamically add characters to the scene, and based on the amount of characters they will get added to our target group, which will determine the current zoom of our camera. Our players can run around the map, start "fishing" and play the mini-game. Upon completion they will be rewarded with a fish in their bucket, which they can then hand in at the Drop-Off zone. We also implemented our sabotaging. This dash action will stun any hit player, and make them lose all current fish in their bucket. When stunned user input will be blocked to their character, making them lose valuable time to collect fish! 

And last but not least, when players fall of the map, and they collide with the water. They respawn at the spawn island, and get stunned

Moreover, our prototype scene now supports multiple inputs from different players, handling of which happens totally independent from one another.

This week, we also created a movement system based on ragdoll physics. The main goal was to create a solid and responsive movement mechanism that complements the very characteristic design of our map with elevation changes. The first stage consisted of creating the underlying mechanics of movement. We reconfigured bones to use configurable joints, thus ensuring each movement appears natural as well as dynamic, by applying constraints and forces. Along with the intrinsic movement mechanics, a dash was added, allowing for an acceleration in order to quickly travel in the desired dash direction. We tested different dash lengths and speeds in order to create an optimal balance between responsive controls and map size. Additionally, we incorporated seamless transitions on stairs during climb in light of the significance of vertical navigation in our map. This feature was crucial at different elevations where collision detection and slope management needed to be carefully adjusted. To sum up, this week's progress laid the groundwork for more engaging and entertaining gameplay. 

With multiple players with many systems, such as movement and collisions, proving their efficiency and validity, as well as the blockout being ready, we came to the need of implementing multiple player input. The main challenge was to make the system fully independent from other player inputs, to prevent them from overlapping while moving or participating in the fishing. While the system was being made, an additional blocker was added, to prevent players from accessing the same fishing spot if someone has entered it before the other player, which means players must fight in order to secure the spot. In addition to that mechanic and independent inputs, having multiple players meant tracking of individual scores, which resulted in creating simple HUD system, that displays players score. And as a final addition to finalize the gameloop for our prototype, a simple hand-in system was incorporated in the gameplay, allowing players to fight for championship with others.

Art

Environment blockout

During this week we did some more quick brainstorming and concepting of how the environment would look. The art team has been hard at work trying to settle on something fun, playable and visually appealing. After that we finished the blockout, collisions we added to it. Then we looked if the scale was alright and kept on working on the prototype. 

RFX? The big think

Last week, in our future plans we mentioned the implementation of the effects tests done in Unreal to Unity. W E L L  A B O U T  T H A T. It kind of kicked our vents. Which is to say Unity was rather uncooperative, party due to our lack of experience with the visual effects graph and partly due to the version we settled on using for our game having some... quirks. For the moment no functional prototypes have been achieved but we remain hard at work; several domesticated fish have been assigned to figuring this one out(we are consulting with what available options there are according to the interwebs).

Production pipeline - the even bigger think

This week we also spent some time thinking about the exact steps and variables for our production pipeline, and putting those in our Techdoc. Everything has been tested, the file is clean and coherent and we are ready set go!

Which leads us to...

Artbible? Techdoc?

As mentioned above, finally finished! Hook, line, and hurrah! This week we spend a good portion of the time adding to and polishing up both the Art Bible and the Techdoc, as well as, applying all the feedback we have received for each, which naturally resulted in a fish-ton of paperwork. We have also been working hard on finalizing the  Game Design Document so here is to sending out hopes and prayers this all means that going forward work will be all smooth sails.

Future plans!!

• Work on backlog and assign estimated times a task will take
• Assign to-do’s to everyone
• Start production
• Character model, uv unwrap, texture... all that fun stuff
• Asset production (see if the pipeline we have now is doable, fingers crossed it is!!!)
• Figuring out the RFX solutions inside Unity:')
• Improve the overall gameplay experience and expand on those mechanics

With steady hands and a full net, until next time fellow fishermen!