Devlog 5: Production At Last

Hello everyone!
Good news, we got approved for production! This means that after trials and errors experienced during prototyping,  we will start making the game from scratch. Now that the prototyping phase is over, we are heading into Sprint 1. Ideally, this would be a 3-week sprint, but since we spent an extra week on prototyping, our Sprint 1 will last 2 weeks. Welcome to Sprint 1, week 1!

What is planned for Sprint 1?

• Movement Mechanic
• Balance Mechanic
• Obstacles Mechanics
• Camera Mechanics
• Start Menu Buttons (quit & start) + their sounds
• Ambience sound
• Win and Lose SFX
• Animal Distress sounds
• Landscape Implementation + its vegetation
• Character creation

Art Update: 

 When discussing what approach we should take for our landscape we considered the following: 1 singular landscape mesh, an Unreal Engine landscape (sculpt or heightmap), or modular building blocks. We ended up going for the modular building blocks method. This means we can reuse the same meshes to create our environment. Combined with vertex color painting, which can be used for a different ground texture(for example: grass, destroyed grass & dirt etc)

This week we have made our landscape building blocks (the block out), landscape material, obstacle block outs, and combining all of these into a level.
The colors of the obstacles mean the following:
Purple: regular obstruction (eg: mushroom, fence, rock, log), Yellow: invert controls (mine), Orange: speed up (fire), Brown: slippery (mud), Dark grey: death (poisonous plant)

Programming Update: 

We have made significant progress on player movement by ensuring that their rotation correctly aligns with the stretcher. This improvement makes movement connected to the stretcher feel more natural and logical. 

In addition, we have introduced a main menu screen featuring Play and Quit buttons, providing a simple and functional starting point for the game.

We have also added the first set of obstacles, including mud zones, fog zones, landmines, and fire. 

On the systems side, we implemented we've fixed and added in win and fail conditions that consists of zones that will call its respective event when overlapped. We are currently reworking the stretcher balancing system as we've decided to change the input to right stick to hopefully achieve a multiple axes balance system that was hard to do with the previous inputs Left Trigger and Right Trigger.