Welcome magic beings!

this is our second week of production and flying through all the tasks we have setup for ourselves.

ART:

On the tech art side of things, work has started on filing in the map. We created a vertex paintable material with 3 layers that can be fine-tuned to our liking. Later on, support for tri-planar mapping will be added within the layering system to create highly dynamic materials with as little work as possible outside of the engine. This would mean there are 3 ways to fake asset uniqueness in the shader itself: vertex painting, tri-planar world-aligned textures, and an edgewear map we create using a smart material in substance painter. The first iteration of our tower core visuals has also been created, a shader with parallax mapping and multiple layers to create a glowing magical core effect that can crack under pressure Finally, a highly dynamic fog card material has been created that can be used to separate the different layers of our level. The following weeks will be centered around the main topic of our game: towers and the destruction thereof!

The design of the towers has been finalized and game balance has been taken into account. Order lost a lot of the meatiness for the sake of game balance. The shape language of organic vs. angular and negative space vs. filled shapes should also be way more apperent now along with the obvious quirks inherent to Chaos and Order. The final outer layer meshes are hereby finished for both Chaos and Order! Keep in mind the rotation and orientation will be different in-game. Work has begun on unwrapping the towers, which should be finished in no time. Here is a small color preview done in Substance Painter. Two more layers to go before we reach the magical nexus-core!

PROGRAMMING:

This week I made sure the player is actually able to move and rotate, then I went over to creating a player manager that holds all the players for us in the gamemode. After that I struggled a bit with respawning the player cause I wanted to use a dynamic multicast delegate and that took a while to be able to work with cause visual studio IntelliSensedidn't want to show that AddDynamic was an option to bind a function to the delegate itself. But after a while of brute forcing it it started to work. 

for the end of this devlog I tried to make the Force Blast mechanic and the player stun mechanic, both couldn't be finished fully because the boulder isn't fully implemented yet and the player needs to be able to interact with that for the force blast mechanic to work. The stun actually fully works besides that the player doesn't drop the boulder yet when he gets stunned, but that is because the player has not the functionality yet to have a boulder in his hand. 

Though I spent most of my time on the Force Blast mechanics, an hour was lost trying to fix visual studio IntelliSense because we added Niagara to the build and the only way to fix our IntelliSense was by delete all our intermediate files and then rebuilding the whole projects while having no code in vs yet that uses Niagara. 

Also added more functionality to the boulders and the mechanics of them, adding a way to spawn them in, in a way that chooses which side they will be thrown on using the boulderspawner, adding also a bouldermanager that gives a good overview of all the boulders in the level making it easier to manage the boulders in the future.

SOUND:

Here's your friendly neighbourhood sound designer again, to let you know how things are going for Tower Trouble on this front.

For this second week of production, my focus has been on sound design. I've created the attack sounds and their variation for each side and prepared them for implementation. I simplified and made the sounds less heavy for now. Like this I hope to leave room for the force blast sounds and the destruction of the tower and the environmental interactions stemming from there. I've also done the basic setup for the mix, meaning the main sound classes and a base mixer. The music and ambience are ducked whenever a spell is fired.

I made a note to myself that looking at the progression of the music should be on top of my priority list for polish, because the way the instruments cut off and come in right now at times can be quite jarring.

That was it for this weeks devlog, see you back next week.