Hello!

Welcome to our third devlog! This time we have officially started on our production!

We came together, decided on all the tasks we could come up with, set up our first sprint and went to work!

Here’s a sneak peek into our first week’s progression.

Artists

For the first week the artists have focused on two things, creating some base blocks and our main character. First of all, we decided to draw out concepts before we started to work on the meshes itself. This way we ensured that the designs we came up with were greenlit by all our team members and we avoided future headaches.

For the Props and Characters we found a new, modular way of texturing. We work on a very small texture (4x4 or 2x2) with every pixel filled with a unique color that’s part of a selected color scheme, on these colors we unwrap the parts of our model. This gives us more control to make quick changes to our texture layout later down the line if needed. It also gives us a sharper result within max making the workflow go faster and easier. For the player character we combined this workflow with the precious one to give more texture density to grander parts of the player character like the face. 

After having made the concept art for the character and figuring out a more fluent, free way of texturing. We made the model of the player character, rigged it, added first animations and started texturing it. 

For the blocks we were able to try out our full pipeline to test the waters and see if they came out correct. Minus some small issues that needed to be figured out, our blocks finished faster than we had anticipated, which allows us more space to add various extra features down the line (YAY!). Sadly we weren’t able to implement them into our build yet. This should be rectified in our next build so look forward to it!

Concerning the comfort block, we finally decided to go with the last concept - a bed. In this case a 64x64 texture was needed because unlike the other blocks, the bed has 4 different sides so 4 different texture tiles were needed. After upscaling the texture to 512x512, we added color gradients on top of it to make it pop out. Additionally, we used the power of the normal map to get some extra height detail on it, resulting in a more 3dish look and feel. We figured out to keep the height information localized to the colors on the pixel texture to not end up with an ugly mix between pixel art and high resolution texture.

For the character animation we looked for fitting animations on Mixamo. Therefore we had to upload our 3d model which caused a few problems. On one hand we need enough polygons to bend the mesh properly on arms and legs, on the other hand this bending caused some artifacts in Mixamo. After mesh tessellation, we figured out that the head needs to stay un-tesselated because otherwise it bends along with the body.

To avoid this, we kept the head a simple box. After fixing this particular issue we moved on with searching for fitting animations. We didn’t find the perfect animation we wanted to have so we tweaked some sliders for the animation speed and the way the character moves to achieve the desired result.

The next step was to import the mesh along with it’s animations to Unreal Engine. The animations worked flawlessly. However, to ensure a smooth movement in the game, we want to blend the jump, walk and run animation. For said animation blending, we currently work on setting up a smooth character movement.

Coders

We started completely from scratch, no more prototyping. Basic character movement was implemented together with block spawning mechanics. 

The block spawning was also improved from last week’s prototype. The random spawning algorithm now makes sure that there’s always a path that the player can follow. 

It’s also easy to integrate new blocks and variants so that we have an easy time adding our future block additions. The Basic character movement also has changed compared to the last prototype, our input bindings are now cleanly separated from the character and put in a player controller.

Next week will be the camera's turn and many more features, for now have a look at this little video:

Game Controls

For this devlog on, we'll be adding the controls for our game as well, and update it weekly to showcase added changes.