What we did this week.

This week we entered the first sprint of our production phase. We started out by making an extensive planning of what tasks we have to do and who will do them.  After this we went straight to work on the game.

We implemented the controls needed for 2 players to control one character. After that we implemented the basic movement and dodging. These still need some further refining. Especially the  separate arm movement, as some undesired results can still occur.  
The foundation for our food pickups has also been laid as we made a class with all the necessary functions, from which we can later inherit and override specific functions to alter the behavior for each type of food. 
Lastly on the programming side we started working on our throwing mechanic. Currently this only works with other players and not any obstacles.

The dodging mechanic is currently in the testing phase to make sure the everything is working correctly. So we can fix the hidden bugs. 

We started working on the model of our main character: the Sumo wrestler.
A block-out was made in Zbrush and then polished. 

The main textures were also made. We want to use flat colors and gradients for our props in the future. Some spots in the textures were left blank  in case we need more colors. It will be easier to adjust that during the process without having to modify already made unwraps.

 We've made a simple blockout in Unity to test the size of the play area and the proportion of the character and props. We have also been playing around with the point of view of our camera :

This is the view we will continue with. It still needs to be further elaborated and tested:

Problems during the first week.

The dodging mechanic was annoying to  develop. We tried different techniques. Finally we've found a technique that currently works. Hopefully we can use this technique. Otherwise we will run in problems later on in the development. The main problem with the first technique was that he felt over. We fixed it by locking his rotation but that will give a problem in the future. 

For the Sumo Wrestler model, we had some trouble with finding the right flow for re-topology. It' still a fairly new skill and it didn't go as smoothly or fast as we wanted. The first attempt started out OK but the artist felt like there would be a better way to tackle this and tried a different approach.

The other approach was to use Zremesher in Zbrush to try and get as close as possible to a low poly model while retaining a nice poly-flow. Further testing on how to approach this must be done.

The textures for the props needed be thought out. It took a very long time to define which colors and gradients we should use for our props. We needed to make an overlook of every asset we're planning on making and tried to estimate which colors and how many colors a prop would need.  

E.g.:

The block out was a challenge too. It was hard to define the proportions for every piece of our game from scratch. It still needs to be tested and adjusted.

What are we doing next week?

Next week we will continue working on our character movement. We'll start working on a bumping mechanic( as in a knock-back when players bump into each other)  and the different types of food. We will be finalizing the dodging and throwing mechanic so that we can play our game, like it's suppose to do. 

The re-topology for the character should be done this week, as well as the unwrap of the model.  The block out will be tested so that we'll know for sure which proportions we should use. We will also work further on the camera view of the game. After that, we can start with a basic composition. Beside, we'll also start on making some models for the game, more specifically the powerups.