Salutations dear readers! It's the end of our first production sprint and our core gameplay features have been implemented.

ART:

On the art side we noticed that the mesh we had last week wasn't exactly Chaos engine ready. We needed to seperate all the objects into seperate meshes and also layerize the tower. Cutting out a base for the towers proved slightly challenging as we already had modelled the inside. We couldn't simply multi-cut our way through without having to redo the inside. Eventually settled on hole punching a plane with our desired brick-like shape into the tower. Then cleaning up the mess created by booleans, which was pretty time consuming.

Speaking of time consuming, the meshes have been fully unwrapped but still need some tweaking in terms of texel density based on importance and ordering in the UV space. However, beware of falling rubble! because the chaos meshes are already in the game and destructible!

this involved setting up the fracture and fields settings in some back and forth with both programming and sound design. Eventually we got it right and we are happy to have this proof of concept! If you are interested in the specifics of how this was set up, I will again refer you to the tech art doc!

Work has also begun on setdressing the level, which will be further expanded upon in the coming sprint.

PROGRAMMING:

The c++ wizards were at it again and this being the last week of the sprint we had to finish as much of the main mechanics as we could.
I took the throwing, force field and stun mechanic into a count, the first part being the force field mechanics where after a while I saw that I was making a big mistake and had to rethink on how to fully work it out, but being that the forcefield mechanic wasn't the highest priority one I went of to the throw mechanic that surprisingly went pretty fluently, a bit of research was needed to show the trajectory in game but besides some small value tweaking the throwing was fully implemented. For the stun mechanic I hit the issue that my onhit event only got called by the first player and not all the rest, I haven't actually found what the issue is around that but instead of check if the player is hit I just checked if the boulder hits something and there it worked perfectly fine.

https://gyazo.com/d5eb4bbfd9fe47f0d116bada7af766d1

SOUND:

On the Audio Artificer front, the sounds for the pick up and throw have now been properly implemented into the game logic. There is also a sound effect when the boulders hit the tower specifically, and the force blast also makes itself known in the soundscape when triggered. Next to that I also worked on the mix and applied basic attenuation and spatialisation settings to all the sounds that needed them. This has also opened up some much needed space in the mix. The listening experience has a way to go still, but we're getting there.

The main quirk I dealt with was some unexpected behaviour on the sounds for the boulder spawn. I applied a concurrency asset that limited it to 2 voices globally. This resulted in the sound being played twice, and then never again even when changing the resolution rule. Allowing for voice recovery fixed this issue.

With that said, I was able to do everything I had planned for sprint 1. In sprint 2 I'll be looking into adding vocalisations for the wizards, bringing the tower cores to life and adding sounds to our floating platform.

Thanks for reading, and until next week!