Production week 5

We entered the 3rd sprint of our project, and have most of the basics down! So far, art wise, we have a decorated level, vegetation, characters, enemies, weapons, a spaceship, shaders, and some fx's. We enjoyed a bit of a break during easter and took it a bit slower for 2 weeks, but are picking up the pace again since we only have a few weeks left untill the end of the project. 

What we have been working on recently are some enemy textures, weapon models and textures, and particle effects

We wanted the enemy creatures to stand out from it's environment as much as possible so that they are easy to see. Most of the environment parts are rounded in shape and have warm and green-tone colors. That's why we chose to give the enemies a bright purple and turquoise color scheme, we wanted them to look toxic and dangerous but not necessarily ugly. To make them still feel like a part of this world, we gave them a leaf-texture on thir back as to look more organic. 

We also got started on the weapons! They are very low-poly since they will be tiny in-game and don't need much detail at all. The colorscheme of the weapons are white-grey-orange to fit the space ship that the main characters fly in. This is a work-in-progress shot as the textures are not done yet. These weapons will be scattered across the level for the characters to pick up. They can also be traded witch each other, but only one weapon of each will be in the game. 4 different weapons for 4 players, so you can figure out during the game which weapon you prefer!

For our character animations, we decided to try and use Mixamo! It's a website owned by adobe that offers pre-made animations and a simple rigging tool to apply quick animations to your character models. Since we don't have an animator in our team, this is a very handy time-saver! Mixamo only works with humanoid character though, so our spider-like enemies will need to be rigged and animated manually. As said before, we don't have an animator in our team so it's taking a while to figure out how to do manual animation. But we're determined to make it look good anyway! 

We have started on making the first effects as well! We have an effect for blood spatters on the enemies, smoke from the spaceship, and various effects for pickup items. 

The programmers have been working on fixing issues and improving the already-existing gameplay elements. 

Now, when the player falls into the water, they will automatically respawn. In our previous version, the players would get stuck underwater and not be able to continue playing. Any dropped items in the water, like weapons and ship parts, will now respawn as well. 

Also, we decided to remove the reloading element of our game. We noticed that reloading was pretty annoying for the players and did not add to the fun or excitement of the game. You can now also shoot by holding the trigger down and shooting bullets faster with a higher speed as well. Also, some aiming issued have been improved.