Completing a Basic Level 1

What we’ve done so far: This past week, we primarily focused on finishing our creation of a basic level 1. This is separate from the previous level that we've been working on (level 0), we'll be treating that one as a level that we can test and play around with moving forward. Level 1 now has all the static props from the art team to form a lovely bedroom environment in Unreal. We iterated on collision boxes a few times to prevent our player from jumping over the level or walking into the wall. Added the main menu screen for players to start the game and navigate to instructions as needed. Our countdown timer for the level was not appearing in the final packaged game (.exe file), but that was fixed after strenuous hard work from our developer Minyi. We also got object drop physics in our game now which shows a better visual representation of when the object is in our hand and when we drop it.

What our next steps are: Our next steps are to add the new background music given to us, and separate it from the main menu music. We also would like to work on an isometric camera since that is the perspective we want to present to players and will allow them to keep track of the cat and other things in the environment. And of course, we would like to build different features like a cardboard box or a red light which we could use as items to distract the cat (currently we just have a general blue object that is used to distract the cat).

Important discoveries along the way: Our game could be easily beaten at the moment by jumping onto a static prop and staying there with the treat to prevent the cat from eating it. Now, this is a very easy way to win the game and we would like to address this moving forward. We may want to disable jumping or think of a way to allow the cat to jump onto these static props. The playtesting session will definitely reveal things we did not consider as developers so definitely looking forward to the results of that. We also have to consider the fact that we can pick up multiple items simultaneously which we don't want and will need to fix. 

We have our main mechanics down: 

1. Picking up items to distract the cat
2. Moving food away from the cat
3. The cat is eating food and is growing larger

And we are super proud of the work we've done to solidify these mechanics! Moving forward, we need to consider the specific interactables the cat will be interacting with and how to program that into our game (i.e. cardboard box, red light).