Posted May 06, 2025 by PatricijaKeica
Welcome to this weeks weekly devlog! We are currently in the middle of sprint 2, which means we are slowly nearing the end. You know what that means! Production is going full speed and we are a little bit sleep deprived, a little bit tired but still super excited to share this weeks progress!
Our game's whole theme resolves around two kids under a trench coat. As you might have noticed, we don't have a trench coat. We had to make a change to that. Jakub spent almost all of his time this week on experimenting with the implementation of it. At first, it seemed trivial to use cloth simulation. After all, Unreal should make it pretty trivial to work... right?
Well, not entirely. When enabling cloth simulation, the coat did not react to the players movement, even though the collision were set up correctly. After playing around with it for an ungodly amount of time, Jakub decided to try and use an animation blueprint instead. Since the top kid's movement is entirely simulated, that was the only sane approach to getting it's pose. What he ended up doing is clone the rig of the top kid onto the trench coat and import the coat without creating a separate skeleton and physics asset for it. Instead, in the import settings, he selected the top kid's skeleton and physics asset. This allowed the animation blueprint to use the top kid's skeletal mesh as a source for the copy pose from mesh function inside the animation blueprint. The result is not ideal; the coat feels rubbery and stiff. This is what we have for now, but we will continue improving it!
We had to part ways with Patricija’s vertex animations for the cinema workers. It was a tough call, but at least Patricija was able to quickly export basic bone based versions instead. (No worries we will still use Vertex Animations for NPCs!)
Besides our lovely characters, another important thing is the coat. Patricija updated the coat model, so it also has some nice details like buttons and stiching. She also rigged the coat, but in the end the programmers had to make some adjustments to it so it works in the game. She plans to texture the coat during the next week after we know for sure, that the coat works and wont be changed later.
Patricija made the barriers that are used for the players to get in the snack room. They can only access this arrea by having a ticket. In fron of the barrier there are ticket checkers that check the ticket.
Patricija also made smaller props, that will be placed around the level, like cans and drinks. They also have squished versions, so we can create a lively and messy enviornment.
Patricija was managing the Arcade Zone and tying everything together. She made Arcade Zone signs, the rug, Air Hockey and boxing machine. She also finished placing posters made by Len throughout the level, assigning textures to the walls and placing other finished props so our Cinema starts filling up.
Akshit worked mainly on texturing and model few small props for this Week on NPCs and main Snackstation .