HELLO!

Welcome the fourth devlog! This is the first week that we officially started production.

We set up all our tasks and started on our first sprint of creating our game.

ART:

We've started work on concrete designs for the towers and blockouts in 3D. The shape language is especially important, so it's good we have specifically outlined those rules in our artbible. Currently still discussing major elements of the designs, such as where to place the energy source, what do those look like, how do we solve the towers having different surface areas (to hit)...?

We are still very much in the discovery stage and much is subject to change.

On the more technical side, some work went into balancing the layer system in our implementation of the Chaos engine for the towers. Each tower will have different layers that will have to be destroyed during the game, getting this right is of utmost importance to the gameplay loop.

Our core gameplay loop consists of different phases that rack up in intensity, the game goes into a new phase every time the tower has been damaged beyond a threshold. At the start of every phase (which happens after crossing these thresholds), a layer of the tower is broken off, revealing a new one. For this to work correctly we needed a way of gauging how much the tower had been damaged. We needed slightly more complex behavior chaos fracture levels alone. This system makes it significantly easier to pinpoint exactly when the entire layer will fracture. It also allows the players to damage anywhere on the tower, expecting the player to hit a single area multiple times would be unreasonable for a party game, especially since we know the aiming mechanic to be difficult. With this system implemented, we can now get a percentage that represents the damage done to each layer.

The game relies heavily on particle effects for player feedback. Visual effects have been added for the newly added Force Blast mechanic along with a visual trail for thrown boulders. We had a blast doing this and are looking forward to working more on this. The particles do wonders in making the mechanics feel satisfying.

The camera angle has also been updated, the camera is now situated higher above the playing field, allowing players to see more easily which way they are facing and thus aim more correctly

PROGRAMMING:

The c++ wizards are back with the start of the production. All our prototypes got thrown out and we started from scratch again using a blank solution in unreal.

Setting up the project wasn't that big of a deal but we just had a small scare when we made the c++ project that our c++ classes folder didn't show up. But apparently creating a first c++ class fixes that issue.

We then went on our separate ways, I took the player character, player controller and gamemode under my wing. For the player character we just made the basic components needed like the skeletal mesh, movement component and the collision component, the logic for the inputs are for next week.

For the player controller I struggled a bit but after a lot of bug fixes and debugging I made sure all the inputs work and the player controller is able to recognize those inputs in game.

Then for the gamemode, I implemented the spawning of all the players, setting them to the correct team and making sure the right player controllers are set to the right players and it also makes sure that those players spawn on the right spot.

SOUND:

The resident sound designer, chiming in to let you know how things are going. Going into production for Tower Trouble we had a few questions left that we needed to answer. It was very difficult to know where the player was aiming still, and the controls were somewhat unyieldy. Since I need implemented features to start working on the audio implementation, I took it upon myself to go into our prototype and try a few things out. I found a way to visualise the path of the projectile and adjusted rotation speed of the characters while carrying a boulder. Those small changes already made a big difference, and with that in place we can start implementing it our dev branch.

I also went and prototyped another feature we would still like to add: the force blast!
With this power the players will be able to deflect incoming projectiles to keep themselves and their tower safe.

For the sound I did some set up of meta sound graphs I will need throughout the project: the randomizer and the basic attack sequence graph.
The adaptive music is also up and running in our level.

See you humans next week on our new devlog!