Introduction

WHOOOOW! We're finally here!
Easiest. Sprint. Of. Our. Lives.
We're not tired at all. We totally didn't plan waAaaAay too much for one sprint. Nooo... totally not! (lmao lol jk we're dead)
But we're still glad you're joining us again today for a new devlog! 

The first sprint is finally over and it is time to wrap things up for now. As we would say in Dutch "We took too much on our horns". But we rather have too many tasks at the beginning of this project than at the end. In a way, it learned us how to gauge our own capabilities while giving us an optimistic goal to pursue. Luckily, after the past three weeks, our team can proudly say that we're happy with the result we already have. There might be some rough edges left but it is a nice start. 

I hope you'll enjoy today's devlog!

Progress

Player Animations

After the final models for the robot and monster were done, we could search Mixamo for some good animations for them. And oh boy we did. The robot stayed true to its blocky nature with some "snappy" movements, while the plushy monster is more kawaii-zombie-like (Yes that exists).

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Furthermore, Mixamo gave us some smooth animations for jumping, running and standing idle. The only thing left was an animation for sliding down a wall. Luckily this animation is just a static pose, which is why we could easily make it ourselves. 
Sadly enough, we noticed that our current code didn't support these animations the way we expected. A lot of time was spent rewriting the code to make it all work. Although it was annoying at the time, it clearly made our code and the gameplay cleaner.

Scale Issues

Let us give you some good advice: SIZE MATTERS! 
Most issues we faced this week were related to the scales of our props. Yes, scales. Plural.

While everything else went smoothly during the past few weeks, it was inevitable that some things would get overlooked. For us, this was the lack of a uniform scale across the level. Some objects were either super small or super big. As a result, we did what every teenage boy would do in this situation: Compensate... by manually adjusting the scale of the props every single time. 

As you can imagine, this wasn't very handy nor efficient! To ensure everyone would be on the same page while creating meshes, we researched how each individual software in our pipeline handles units and conversions. After repeatedly going over this multiple times and adjusting different settings we finally found a good workflow we can all use. A couple of scenes were put together utilising the correct settings and proportions. A correct in-game reference is used to compare new props that get added. 

All artists are now able to either use the scenes as a starting point or import the scene into their work-in-progress file to make sure the scale is correct from the start. We immediately used this workflow to fix all meshes with an incorrect size.

Jumping platform: the spring

We fixed a bug with our jumping platform, where the player sometimes wouldn't immediately bounce while landing on it.  It regained it responsive feel from the prototype and is thanks to the newly added spring animations even better!

Character Selector

This week we are also re-introducing the character selector. This is accompanied by a basic layout of how we generally want it to look.
Note that the visual part of the selector is still a work in progress.

Additionally, in contrast to the prototype version, we spent a lot more time fine-tuning the behaviours of our game.
For example, we now avoid confusion in the case where 2 players hover over the same character. If one of those two players locks in, the other player will hover over another available character.

Oh, the vlog is done already. Well, you know what they say: Time goes fast when you're enjoying yourself! The goal of this sprint was to create a "good" version of our prototype, using structured code and some visual assets. We can all agree that we've reached this goal. Hopefully, you are as eager as us to view the future development of this game! As a group, we thank you for reading this devlog! As a certified weeb and Japan fanatic, I say どうもありがとうございます.

Chiao!

-This text was funnyfied by uwu Gilly-