Hello everyone and welcome back to our devlogs!

This week we began our first production sprint. We divided up the tasks we made last week and started working.

We had some issues, but most of it went smoothly :). 

Art

We started on the blockout of the level, together with the procedural material that is going to cover it. This is just the start of our level and is by no means finished. It has a starting area without enemies and limited obstacles, so the two players can learn to work together.

The material on the tiles a  completely customizable material made in Substance Designer, it also has a version with grass ontop! Together with the blockout we started on some assets, here is our first finished asset: the breakable wall. This wall will be broken by the player to continue through the level.

We also started on the characters and enemies, doing some more concepting and starting the modelling. 

In general, the game is starting to come together, all our work for planning and researchig is starting to pay off. The next step for us is texturing the models, together with making the water shader, interactables' models and other enemies' models to finish off the main concept of the game. After this we can start with doing secondary things, like foliage, lily pads and archways.

Coding

We also started working on the enemies, since they are an important part of our game. 

We made a health and attack component, they make it easier to add functionality to game actors.
The health component for example will be used by the enemies, player and breakable obstacles.

A base enemy character was also created, it contains a health component, attack component and character movement component.
This base class will be inherited from to create all the other enemies, those other enemies need to implement their own movement logic.
The horde enemy is the only enemy we fully implemented so far, they try to take the shortest route to the player and do damage when in close proximity.
To simulate their horde behavior, they also have variable movement speed. This still needs some tweaking to make the horde look better, but the that's a task for the polishing phase.

A lot of the coding time was spent learning how to use c++ with Unreal Engine, and building base classes and components to make our future lives easier. In the coming weeks, we'll be making more enemies and also obstacles, so stay tuned for that.

Game Controls

The controls for our game didn't change this week, but we'll post it again so you know how to play the prototype, even though only moving and jumping is implemented so far.