What we did this week.

This is our second production week. We tried to resolve all the problems we had in the previous week. 

Mechanics

At the start of this week, we made our character's rig and bones. We wanted to implement that in the engine so that we could use the bones to control the position of the arm. This was important to show the player in which direction he was going. In the engine itself we made it possible to move the arm towards a point so that the the bones would follow it. We used an IK-setup script for this. Currently the arm goes through the player but this will be fixed by adding constraints, although this has proven to be harder than we assumed. We need to put more effort into making it look natural and to avoid cases like this...

Next up we've made different power-ups that would improve the player during the game. These power-ups would be spawned by a cannon in the background of our level. The placement of the cannons will show you whether you should expect a power-up or not. 

Finally we started working on the bumping mechanic. Players are now unable to move for one second after bumping into each other. They are thrown back for a certain distance, depending on the mass they have.

We found some bugs in the dodging ability. One of the problems was that you where able to dodge while still in air. This is not a 'feature' we want in our game.  So after some testing we found out what the problem was and how to fix it. 

Level blockout

After some testings in the level, we filled it with a few quickly modelled meshes. Not only shows the level now the vision of our game, it will be easier for us to continue to work from a blockout. We've also made some more adjustments to the size of the play and background area. Beside, we've also defined our main camera position.  

Meshes and texturing

Art-wise, we've focused on getting our Character textured. To give him as much detail as possible, we hand-painted the texture for our Sumo Wrestler. 

The power-ups items don't need as much detail, so we didn't need to use hand-painted textures as well. They were modelled and unwrapped in such a way that separate parts have one solid/gradient color.  This method allows us to create depth and desired details in the props/ power-ups.

Problems during the second week.

The biggest problem with the skinned mesh and bones was that the rotation of the arm was different from what we were expecting when we imported the mesh. We found outthat the problem was in the Y-axis rotation, so we had to tweak how we did the rotations specifically for the arms.  After these tweaks we got a better result. The arms were still clipping through the character itself because we are translating/rotating them through code and not animations. This unfortunately means we cannot rely on the rig itself to prevent the arms from going through the mesh. We already tried to limit their rotations in code but as of now  we couldn't get it to work perfectly. We will have to work further on this next week.

The cannons were annoying to make because there were different types of food or obstacles so we needed to setup a framework that would work for different types of food or obstacles. That wasn't easy,  the main problem was that the components of our objects were spread over the game objects so we had to make sure you could find them.

We needed to tweak our play area a lot.  At times it seemed too big or too small. Defining the composition of the back area was not easy either. We're still discussing if we'll make more height differences, but with that idea we might take the attention of the play area away...

When modeling the sushi (power-up) our artist started out from the idea of making a simple sushi boat with some signature sushi items on top. However the boat took away too much attention from the sushi itself so they went with a simple wooden board instead.

What are we doing next week?

We will try to get the movement of our sumo wrestlers completely finished and get all mechanics involving them up and running as well. If this goes smoothly we will start work on the camera behavior and the behavior of the starting platforms that 'fly' in at the start of a game. Once all the food item models (power-ups) are finished and the character is fully rigged we will start on working on the play field and surroundings.