Hello everyone! Welcome to our new update on our game project for this week. 

Artists:

Exciting news! We’ve finished up our character, so now we have textured / rigged character running around

We also have some blocks that spawn now. So far we have a base regular block, a rapid falling block and a comfort block. so far the blocks don’t live up to their names yet, but they should for the next build.

We started to work as well on the background for the standard biome. We started off with some concepts, decided on our favourites and drew out the version of the ingame background.

When designing the water element, we got multiple options how to let the water look like. Finally, we decided for the second one in the first row, combining nice bright water with a gradient.

For the island creation for the first biome we first had to create concepts to choose which island shape we would like to go for.

This is how the first prototype of the standard island biome looks like. Later on this island can be used as base for other islands we are going to create for this biome.

The whole island is unwrapped on a non-unique texture set to keep scaleability and performance.

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 artefacts in Mixamo. After mesh tesselation, we figured out that the head needs to stay untesselated 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 finetuned our movement and set up a scene camera. A better system for block spawning was designed with biome support!

The player will find himself in new biomes over time which means biome specific blocks. Biomes are easy to make and configure so that the block spawner can easily know what kind of blocks will be required. 

Soon these biomes will also change the background and a lot’s of new mechanics.

Gamecontrols: