Devlog 6: starting sprint 2

Hey everyone, this week kicks off the first week of sprint 2.

sprint 2 is all about making sure every feature is in our game, adding some flair with animations and FX, and making sure the playing experience is as pleasant as possible.

this is our progress for this week:

Stunning a player

Previously, when a player got dashed into by another player, not much happened. The dashed player dropped their trash but that was about it. Now, when a player gets dashed into, this player will be temporarily stunned. The player will be thrown into the air and lose control for a while. After a certain amount of time, the player will move upright again and regain control of the character.

Sounds

We implemented an easy way to add sounds to any in-game actions. To avoid repetition, a sound resource consists out of the following parts:

• A list of different sound files to randomly choose from when a sound gets played
• A min and max pitch, a random value within this will be chosen every time.
• A min and max volume, similar in function to the pitch range.

Because of these things, an event can occur multiple times in a row (for example multiple players dashing repeatedly) without sounding repetitive.

More interesting trash

Our first implementation of trash only had trash spawning at random locations throughout the map. However, now we expanded on this by allowing the player to dash into certain objects, a trash can for example, to get the trash out of this. This will bring more variety to the trash collecting mechanic.

Rigging the character mesh

After Dynameshing the previous draft of the main character mesh (raccoon) and Zremeshing for a cleaner polyflow it was time to rig and skin the character.
 

In the right picture, you can see the bones of the character skinned to the mesh. The joints have the right orientation to ease the animating process. This is one of the next steps, after the skinning and editing of the weight paint of the mesh.

Redesigning the map

After playtesting we got the feedback that the map could be a bit more compact and smaller and to avoid sharp turns during platforming sections by trying to either make the truck not turn or make the turns smoother.
We are currently experimenting with different styles of maps to avoid the turning of the truck while putting more of an emphasis on the dressing of the environment 

Learning some things in unity

We also spend some time furthering our knowledge about the unity Render pipeline, lighting, postprocessing, and the FX system used in unity to make sure we can give our game some cool visual flair that will make it look better.

Beware of raccoons

We now have a pause menu and some HUD elements so that means that we needed to make some cool Icons and menus
we are currently working on creating all kinds of elements to make the menus look better than just some boring old buttons.

that is all for this week,

Cya later fellow trash pandas.