Now that the second week is behind us, let's take a look at what our team has accomplished so far!

Camera

There is now a working camera set to a fixed angle on the map, we wanted to give the players ample visibility on the field and to achieve that we had to get a good and working viewport in place. We also added an early prototype of the character models as well as some obstacles/props into the game engine. The reason for this choice is so that we can have an idea of how the models look and how the artists should approach making final designs. (But I would be lying if I said I wasn't tired of staring at beans for hours on end.. -Rity)

Obstacles

Along with this our programmers made it possible to see through obstacles on field so you never lose sight of your teammates when you play together! This decision was made because our game will only be played on one screen with multiple players.  On top of this we did not want the big obstacles to create another layer of difficulty and present the possibility to camp on other players and make the experience unbalanced towards new players.

UI and Interactions

Something else we wanted to do was finding a good way to display the player's team and indicate which player is controlling which character. We found that it was quite easy to lose track of your character during the gameplay, so we implemented an overhead UI that indicates your player's number and team color! This UI faces the camera so the text is clearly visible and always above the character's head. It isn't limited to players though as we found a way to recycle the functionality to show information about the fire also. 

Along with this, the programmers were also wondering how the interactable elements of the game would work. So a basic implementation of an interaction system was added. This allowed us to test out a basic item pick up prototype and a basic fire prototype. With these 2 elements combined, we're now able to have a very rough idea of how a match would go in the game!

Maya to Unity

We also looked into how exporting from Maya to Unity will work since none of our artists have used Unity before. We found that Maya has a built-in send to Unity feature when exporting which is very easy to use. The only problem we ran into is that Maya uses a right-handed coordinate system and Unity uses a left-handed one. Simply put this just means the axes are oriented in different directions. It was clear that the X-axis that was inverted, meaning we will have to face our models in the negative X direction in Maya before exporting so that they face the positive X direction when imported into Unity.

Maya before export

Shaders

Furthermore we looked into creating a shader with a cell shading (toon) effect. After following several tutorials and looking at premade toon shader assets and comparing their looks we were able to make a functional toon shader! Only one problem however, our blocky prototype character didn't  interact with the shader as he should. This is because he was made of blocks with hard edges, which didn't work well with the shader's effect that seems to work best with rounder objects. To combat this we added some bevels to our character, this improved the shader's effect but it's not perfect just yet, we will fine-tune it further throughout the coming weeks.

Shader showcase

Shader showcase on character with outline

Characters

Are you curious how your characters will look like in the finalised game? Lucky you because we already have some sketches to show for our mascot Grot!

You'll be able to play him and 3 other cavemen during release, the designs are in their early stages currently but we can show you a sneak peak of his caveman friends. ;)

That's about it for this week's progress, we hope you're looking forward to reading more about our journey in future updates!

With love and fire, the Dev-men.