Insert linkHellow Hellow there! Welcome back to this weeks devlog for our game 

The floor Is Hacked!

as promised this week i will start off with another vaporwave/synthwave song just too get you guys in the mood and setting of our game.

At the start of last week we entered our first production sprint. This sprint will take 3 weeks and every week we need to put roughly 10 hours into the game production. This meant we could already start making Some assets and coding for the final game.  

First of i will go over The visual changes of the game. 

Question 1:

What are the first itterations of the Character?

For the character design we went in and cleaned up our last model we had and applied a wireframe Shader on it. This will be used to represent the players color in the final game. 

Another feature we want to add to the character still is the idea of currents or hologram energy flowing through the character. to give it some more flair and effects when it moves on the screen.

We also looked more into the creation of our player heads since these will grab the main focus and attention of the players. 

We made a quick blockout of what our heads could look like but we will need to go over multiple ideations to determine how the final heads will look like. The first ideas that came to mind where: Humanoid,TV,triangle and 'internet globe' heads.

The head of david model belongs to Thomas Flynn on sketchfab: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/head-of-michelangelos-david-optimised-d29af50360.... and is merely used to get a rough idea of how it would look like. 

Question 2:

What about the floor?!

Since the floor and its patterns will be a big factor in our game we dived in and tried out a couple of fitting patterns. 

For this we tried to find patterns that almost tile  in the same way. The main reason for this is that we wanted to make the spawning of the tiles add random. So that the code only needs to swith out the mesh and thats it. But not all tiles do. Below some examples.

We also played around with the idea to make the tiles more visualy interesting. So we tried out a labirinth style inlay for our square tiles. 

This sparked the idea of having multiple itterations of one dimension tile. for example we have 4 different labirinth square meshes. This multiplies the amount of variety by a lot!

Here are some implementations in the Game engine Unreal engine 4.27. 

The size of the tiles itself is still something to adjust. we want the tile size to fit a player and a half. That way you can still jump over one if only one tile is gone.

Question 3:

Where are the vertical differences on the playingfield?

We looked into adding some movement to the playingfield. It is a early prototype and not fully optimised but the idea is there. We add a position to the platform based on their posistion which creates a wave. Combine this with a sine and timer and the platforms will go up and down and in future itteration we will have full controll over the distance, frequency and wave length!

At the moment it works seperatly from the tile spawning so we can work on it at the same time.

Question 4:

How will the UI of our Game look like?

Below you see a first draft of what the UI flowchart for our game menu's will look like. 

Now lets move to the programmers side of things. Our programmers have also been very busy with translating all the ideas into code.

Question 5:

How are the Tiles being randomly generated as a playingfield consisting of meshes?

We have made it so that the grid has different dimensions every time you play. This makes it so that there is a variation every time you play. Also by having different shapes for the tiles makes it already fun to play! By having different shapes of tiles the spawning logic isn't always the same.

With this example We could just spawn them next to each other:

But with this example we cant, we had to figure out a different spawning logic:

Question 6:

Having different types of Ammo?

There is a base projectile in which we've made two derived classes of it, a green and an orange projectile, so far it has no functionality and the only thing that differentiate from the two are the colors.
The projectile is made that it will only overlap with the tile and if not overlapped with the tile it will destroy itself after a certain amount of seconds ( three seconds for example ).

question 7:

The spawning of the Ammo?

Above the generated tiles there is a box that spawns ammo. The ammo is spawned every few seconds at a random position inside of the box. The type of ammo that is spawned is also random. The size of the box is always the same size as the grid of tiles that is generated.

Question 8: 

Programming player input and movement?

The player input went very smoothly, we didn't really have problem implementing that.  But we do have to play with the movement of the character. For example the speed or the jump height.