It's that time of the week again! Welcome back dear cave people, we're sure you have a lot of questions regarding the state of the game and the new and shiny improvements of the past week.

Without further ado, let's hear it from the dev team!

Map

We started out by creating the main building blocks of the map which means we're now ready to start creating the final model of the map!

 Two of our artists Cem and Trygve have  started creating modular assets packs for the grass and ridges as well as the two caves, each with their own unique advantages and disadvantages. As we are working towards finalizing the map blockout this is not completely the way it will look like in the end, details and optimisation will happen during the second sprint.

The map now features 2 custom shaders which will speed up our entire texturing process.

Our first shader will create a gradient effect from top to bottom on our assets without using a texture or UV space. The reason for this is to create a gradient over multiple objects in a mesh (like a tree branch sticking out). Without this shader we would have visible seams in our meshes and we could still have to apply a mask texture to create replicate bark or stone.

The other shader is for the grass that now uses a checker pattern as its texture. The checker pattern helps with readability of the shapes and distances of grass instead of it just being 1 color. This shader uses world position so no matter where you place your grass it will always correctly match the grid without seams. Both of these shaders feature a range of parameters to tweak and change at our will.

UI

Having an empty screen during gameplay is no fun, so we now added a little mock-up of the final UI to see how it feels to play with it on your screen! The season progression will be displayed close to the timer so you can keep a close eye on the changing map and items condition by season.

You'll also see the colors of each team in the character icons of each corner soon enough as a small addition and so the icons don't look lifeless!

During the process of bringing the UI lay-out into Unity we fiddled a lot with the placement and finer details of the import settings. Luckily it was all sorted out and our artists now have a good understanding of the UI Builder that we used in Unity!

Characters

We are proud to announce that Grot has some new clothes! The Texture atlas has finally been made and the model improved for blockout, we have 2 beautiful team colors with their own patterns that show the ferocity of your team properly!

Not only that but the animations are implemented and work with the model to the best of their ability. Of course without our team having a rigger or animator this is the best we could do but for the time being we can bring Grot to life with the help of Mixamo!

Movement

Since last week the whole movement has been reworked from the ground up. First we tried using a Character controller for the player movement combined with a Rigidbody that would be used for external forces (pushing, knockback) which is also what we did in our prototypes. However, after 2 hours of trying to get the transition between the two completely smooth and seamless we switched over completely to a character controller. This was quite easy and probably the best way to go for our game.

Pushing 

You can finally boost your teammate up heights to help them steal the opponents fire and get away! The core mechanic is there, but the animation is temporary (yeah, it's a kick at the moment not a push). Some fine tuning will probably have to be done to get the height and vertical distance right, but we are happy to see that it works well with our new movement!

Pick Ups

The ability to pick up items is also completely here now and has an animation! At the moment we only have a stick that you can pick up off the ground, but that will do for now!

Camera

Like you have probably seen in earlier screenshots, split-screen is now working and all the camera's get assigned to the correct player and follow them around. Here you have another screenshot for good measure!

This wraps up the development updates for this week! We hope you enjoyed the newly added features and are pumped for the upcoming weeks!

With love and fire, the Dev-men.