Hello reader,

This week we made the game look more like the real thing than it was before. Last week the game still looked a bit blend and there were not a lot of mechanics. This week we implemented a few new mechanics but the biggest changes happened in the art-department. 

What have we been working on the past week?

------------------------- PROGRAMMERS-------------------------

  Engine

The ship does not magically fly forward. It needs an engine to keep moving, an engine also needs some kind of fuel. Jannis wrote the code for this, and we now have a coal engine on the ship. If the engine is running out of coal a player needs to fill it up again with coal. The coal can be found near the engine, the only thing the player has to do is pick it up and throw it in the engine. If the ship runs out of coal the game ends and you have lost the game.

Progression bar

Right now there is no way for a player to know where the ship is in its journey. This is quite annoying (certainly now because the game just resets when you reach the end). To fix this Jannis implemented a progression bar at the top which shows the players the current position of the ship on its journey. When the indicator is red the engine is low on fuel and needs to be filled up again.

HDRP

This week we switched over to the HDRP, this was my responsibility. The reason we did this is so we can use “Decal projectors”, the decals are used when a bird strikes the ship (instead of the sphere you saw before) this looks better and it makes it clear that you are repairing the ship and not removing bird feces. Implementing this was not as smooth as I expected. But most of the problems I had were my stupid mistakes. 

Bird strike

We are now using another ship and we don’t want the birds to just spawn on one square of the ship. Jannis made sure that birds can land at different positions on the ship instead of just one. There are now 3 spots the birds randomly choose from, this gives the game more variation.  There are also smoke particle effects to make it clear that the damage needs to be fixed.

Falling boulder

A new mechanic, I implemented a Boulders are falling from the sky on a parachute. Once they hit the plane the parachute disappears. The boulder ways down on the ship and (for now) deals damage to it. The boulder can be pushed and pulled by a player in one direction at a time. There is a plank on the ship where the player can push off the boulder. Once it is pushed off the player regains some health. 

------------------------- ARTISTS -------------------------

 Main character

Last week Yano made some nice concept arts for the main character, but you cannot use 2D art in a 3D game. Right now we have a real pirate that the player can control. The coat of the pirate can be changed to represent different players. For now, the pirate uses materials and is going to get dedicated textures in the coming week.

Engine

The new engine mechanic is a nice feature but without models, it looks out of place. Yano made an engine model and a pile of coal. This makes it visually pleasing but also gives an indicator of what is expected from the player. Square boxes do not spark anything, but an engine and a pile of coal make it way clearer to the player what the game expects from him.

Falling boulder

The falling boulder mechanic also needed some meshes that were not made. Yano made them for us.

The Ship

Jasper worked on the ship this week. we now have a ship that is wider and with some more height difference, this gives the player a lot of space to move around. The ship also has some basic materials that later on are going to be replaced by painted textures, but for now it gives an idea of how it is going to look.

The focus for next week?

Programmers:

- Disaster spawner, right now there is no coalition between the different disasters, we need to have something handling it (which wil make it easy to increase and decrease the difficulty)

- Disaster loose cargo needs to be implemented.

- A clearer fail and win state

Artists:

- Rigging and animating the main character 

- Texturing main character

- Texturing props