We assigned ourselves a few more tasks this week:

• Finish the art bible (now available for download on our game page!)
• Finish the tech document (now available for download on our game page!)
• Finish the prototype - this in itself required a few subcategories which we will go into later
• Work in Unity for 2 hours at least to see what kind of prototype we could create
• One character, modeled and textured
• One prop or environmental art piece
• One major effect

The prototype!

Yay more issues!

We had a major bug to fix with our mounting and dismounting feature, the problem was the rotation of the player once they dismounted the dragon. We would end up running around on their sides / on their heads and we couldn't quite figure out the issue. We eventually solved it by locking the forward vector to the positive x and the right vector the positive y.  

We added an item spawner:

The item spawner is pretty simple, it just spawns a box and keeps it there for a certain time, then after a while the item disappears then reappears! If the player dismounts their dragon and walks up to it - the player picks up the item. As of right now the items have no effect on gameplay - we still need to test and see if it is a fun game mechanic

The good news:

We now have a working item spawner, mounting and dismounting abilities, and being able to knock other players off their dragons by charging at them! We even have an effect to show that the player has been knocked off their dragon. We also have the ability to eat other players if they are walking around the level

On the art side:

The main question on the art side was if we should go with fully stylized handpainted textures or stylized PBR.
Because stylized handpainted textures take quite a lot of time we gave stylized PBR a first try. 
If by any chance this didn't work out well we would switch to handpainted textures.

BUT:
We were pretty happy with the outcome after we completed an example cat and a lollipop (used as a lance in game)!

Here are some screenshots of our end results:

Character is also fully rigged and skinned and owns a small animation to show off the rig!

Main issues on the art side:

• Correct naming conventions on textures/meshes/particles/etc... 
• When exporting a 'finished mesh' , we need to make sure everything is ready to be skinned,rigged,imported in the engine,etc... Some issues occured because sometimes we oversee simple things (,f.e. centering the mesh to 0, correct exporting settings, ...) and makes us lose time.

A few answers to last week:

Is our core gameplay mechanic fun to play?

Yes! Being able to charge at each other and knock each other off the dragons can be really fun to play!

Is eating visually working and fun?

Yes! Eating will be fun!

Is the pbr handpainted texture style working together with our overall chosen artstyle?

Yes! the texture style looks good and works with the shapes and style!

Which engine are we going to use?

We choose to use Unreal Engine 18.3!

Reason: 

Our programming Team worked in Unreal and with Blueprints for two weeks now and got the hang of it. They enjoy using Blueprints and creating games with it!

Unreal is more artist friendly and the Artist group is working with Unreal more than one semester now and is more used to it than Unity!

Future tasks:

• Start the actual production sprint! Whoopee! 
• Add UI elements
• Implement everything in a clean and structured way in Unreal blueprints
• Smooth out the rough edges when it comes to controlling the players