Production is now in full swing! We are happy to announce that we have officially entered the development stage of our project and will now be working to bring you a a beautiful, finished version of the game in late May.

More details are yet to be revealed but for now let's run you through what happened this past week!

Camera

We can finally say for certain that we have settled on the 4 camera viewport lay-out for our game. The team tested out both the single camera and the 4-way split screen and found that most of the fun came from everyone getting to focus on one part of the screen and having the added factor of trying to find the other people to sabotage them or take them by surprise!

Gameplay

This week we implemented the base of our movement and input system. This allows players to move around using our basic controls. We also added all of the potential bindings required, all we need to do is implement the systems that these bindings use. We also did some fine-tuning of the movement, this was necessary due to some changes we made to the implementation of it.

Three systems have been set up: the Player Manager, Player Controller and the Game Manager.

The Player Manager is responsible for handling player controllers and serves to store and keep track of the Player Controllers. The Player Controller is responsible for player input, event processing, and the Character. Lastly, the Game Manager manages the match instance., it handles key game systems such as the match timer, player spawning and item spawning.

With these in place, we now have the ability to spawn players into the game, marking another major step in development and can now build upon a decently solid base for the coming week. The base implementation of the Fire and Items are also practically done, their functionality works and just needs to be polished. The items may just need their specific special implementation, but other than that they are functional. Our next goal is bringing everything together, polishing the mechanics to the best of our ability and integrate these systems with the Game Manager, Player Manager, and other gameplay elements. 

At this stage, there isn’t much to showcase visually from the programming side, as most of the work have been on backend systems. However, these systems are crucial for building the game and ensuring that future features can be implemented smoothly. I hope we can bring you  lots of things to showcase in the coming weeks. 

Map

This week for the map we focused completely on the lay-out by creating a blockout. Since we settled on the 4 player split-screen we have more freedom in how we design the map, we now don't have to worry about players not being able to see their character when they stand behind an obstacle and we can create more height variations. This allows for more tactical gameplay where we force the player to get to the high ground since that's the best escape route, but it is also the best way to ambush other players. It's impossible to climb up a ridge but you can easily drop down one, if you try to catch someone who stole your fire you will have to run up a ramp, if not your enemy could easily out-smart you.

The only problem was the cave, since we wanted to avoid campers Cem made some alternative routes to get to the fire and jump down almost on top of it.  Its still possible to defend your fire, but now you have to cover a larger area.

VFX

This week we also tried our hand at implementing some visual effects. This took a bit of time to get used to since none of our group members have previously worked with the Unity particle system. We do have experience with the Unreal particle system and luckily for us they are quite similar so getting used to it didn't take too long :)

Obviously the first effect we had to try to implement was the fire effect since this will be essential to the game. The result is quite nice and we have also looked into linking it to the score to make it grow when your score increases! The effect was a blend of different tutorials to achieve the effect we want.

We also made a small water splashing effect which will play when you walk through water puddles to add some extra life to our map!

Characters

A quick drawing was made to show the proportions and colors for Grot's character design. With that being finalized there's only two things left to do:

Rig our caveman in Maya

Animate him throwing it back in Mixamo

Okay it didn't exactly happen in that order since we ran into some issues with the rig after importing it from Mixamo to Maya and but the good news is we found a fix for our problems not long after! This model was made for testing purposes only and will be refined in the coming weeks, are you curious what the final product will look like?

As always, with love and fire, the Dev-men.