Welcome to the second week, there is a lot to catch up on, so let's get straight to it

ART:

Welcome again Alchemists! A lot to report up on in the tech art department. Firstly as teased in the last devlog, the rendering pipeline. We are going to use the deferred rendering pipeline simply because it is a more versatile workflow (lighting, post process, prototyping,....), especially considering our target audience is probably going to have at least an RTX 30+ series, there is almost no solid argument for using a forward rendering pipeline. If you are interested in reading more on this topic or any tech art related topic for that matter, you can read/follow my ongoing research and development here!

Now onto the exciting stuff. Our wizards are going to be hurling boulders at immense speeds so that begs the question: “what happens on impact?”, to answer this question I made a prototype in unreal.

The prototype uses the unreal chaos system to make a multi-layered tower that can be damaged and chipped away at by our players! what's more is the entire workflow can be done entirely using unreal. Allowing everyone in the team to balance the amount of damage or the way the tower fractures.

Sadly our team is missing a magical movement mage (aka animator), so I did a crash course on animation blueprints, blendspaces and other goodies that will enable us to implement the animations we need without too much work

Nothing too fancy but our wizards can move while attacking and I have a new potion to add to my list of recipes

We started defining and refining our artstyle! Currently we're feeling very inspired by the likes of Orc Must Die! and Magicka. Work has started on the artbible, defining major design rules to adhere to during the project.

Some research went into stylized handpainted assets in Substance Painter. Stumbled across SimpleDiffuse, a layer that can quickly add base color to meshes and has many parameters for control over things like AO and Curvature. It's a very simple way of adding a color to the curvature and also features emulated brushstrokes. Also looked into Substance Painter baking automation with Python as I'm the style artist and would like to be up to date.

PROGRAMMING:

So after a lot of errors and warnings the c++ wizard has returned, with actual working mechanics now. We looked deeper into our main mechanic (throwing boulders) and in what specific way we wanted to actually do it. After that we went into rotating the player, if we wanted it based on movement or be independent from it making so you can aim anywhere while running in any direction.

Looking deeper we created two different ways of throwing to test out what is best, one with a power bar and one with basic throwing (we also had the idea of making it momentum based but quickly refrained from that idea). 

For the rotation of the player we decided that rotating it independent of the movement was the best solution.

SOUND

The sound sourcerer returns! For this week I shifted focus from the technical implementation part to the sound palette of the game and writing the sound bible. I made some more changes to the effects I already had but wasn't very satisfied. This is the edit regardless.

I've discovered that doing something, and explaining in great detail to someone else how to do it are two completely different beasts. I struggled a bit finding the sounds as well as right words, so I turned to a game I know well with a charge-hold-release pattern to it's skills: Divinity: Original Sin 2. I broke down for myself the different layers of their SFX for different skills and made two new variations: Dark and Light. One side would be dark, one would be light, and this distinction is now reflected in the sound palette for the game.

I also went and made an edit of the music, fading in and out different stems to create a sense rising action toward a climax.I think it all came together nicely.