Devlog #3 - Last research and prototyping

Welcome to our final week of prototyping! Next week, we’ll dive into production to create an enjoyable experience for everyone. But before we move forward, let’s take a moment to reflect on everything we’ve learned this past week as we pushed to get as much done as possible!

DEVELOPMENT

Advanced movement

This week, we took movement to the next level by adding sliding, jumping, and swimming! These new mechanics make traversal more dynamic and exciting, giving players more ways to navigate the world.

Throwing items

We’ve also introduced a new mechanic: throwing fish! Players can now launch fish towards other players to knock them back. This adds an extra layer of strategy and fun to the gameplay, allowing for more chaotic combat.

Orca

This orca has certainly challenged us this week! Everything was going smoothly until we had to update its path dynamically after platform segments break off. We're still working to find the perfect solution, but we're making progress!

Others

• Added visuals to the attack's hitbox.
• Added gamestates.
• Player now always spawns with the same color.

ART

VFX

This week we were looking a bit into vfx in unity and how they work. We made 2 basic vfx examples, one for the blood splatter and one for a about to fall platform. There are still some some technical aspects to explore but all of that what we want to do with the VFX systems is in reach.

Next up was outline for the breaking. We explored 4 options in that regard:

• Inverse Mesh shader: Inverses the mesh with a shader and apply another color to get the outline
• Texture Mapping: Unwrapping the object and creating a mask directly in substance painter. This works but is heavier on the performance since it is an additional texture to load.
• Fullscreen shader: Through the fullscreen we calculate the edges via scene depth in multiple directions. Right now it is applied to everything which is not what we want so we will look into stencils and render layers.
• Sobel filter: We shortly looked into calculating edges via color difference, but this required us to do a deeper dive into HLSL to get the sobel effect and we did not have the time to cover it.

Testing materials in Substance Painter

We did another round of testing texturing in Substance Painter, this time with bolder color scheme - the penguins have to really stand out on the icy platform.

Character Design

Designs for the characters. We went for goofy, cartoonish look, with asymmetrical eyes, keeping in mind that this game should be very silly.

Menu Sketches

A quick sketch of how menus will look like - to be updated with renders of the penguins.