Introduction:

Hello everyone and welcome to the devlog for the second week of the second production sprint! Can you believe it? Second week already, in total three weeks left before we'll have to be finished with our game and hand it in. The pressure; immense, the stress; not healthy. However, everything seems to still be on the correct path so it shouldn't be too bad. 

We had gotten a lot of compliments from our last week build, and we made some very important implementations when it comes mechanic wise but also a lot for our game flow. So we now have a defined start and end to  our project, so hopefully you now won't need to constantly reload the unity.exe in order to play our game again. 

So if you couldn't already infer, that was our main focus for this week, getting our game flow and loop completely rounded with as well, finishing off some of the already present game systems. Such as the respawning system and the initial spawn system. So that all that's left is making the final additions next week before we start polishing all that is currently present within the game to a more presentable state, and then we'll upload it all to get our final points. And for our sake, I sure hope it'll give us enough so we can pat ourselves on the back.

Art Section:

For the art section, both have been very busy making headway on some of the needed visuals for the game. Tommy mostly focusing on the future animations required on our two models, the guards and players. While Matteo has been working on finishing the materials for the floor and wall textures which are so close to reaching a final state. So lets cheer him on, to keep going because the finish line is so close!

So in order to prepare for the animations he will be working on in the coming week, Tommy has been hard at work rigging the models within the game, turning them into our little perfect action figures so we can start posing them however we want. I personally don't much know how animation and rigging work precisely but I've been having fun bopping them up and down to the rhythm of an earthbound song which believe me, can give you hours of entertainment.

Here's some of these rigged models for those that are interested within the inner workings of our project.

When it comes to our Matteo, he has been wrestling a bit with getting the materials done, they are so close to a finished state that I'm sure all that he will need is just to put in 2 more hours and he'll have everything done. From what I've seen, its starting to look pretty well, I'm hoping we'll have the finished materials by the build next week. So please keep with us, we'll make good on our promise. For now, here's a quick look at what these materials might look like in the future.

Along with all this progress, the artists have also been hard at working finishing some of the predefined systems from before. For instance, Tommy has finished adding all of the spawn points for valuables and traps within the ground floor of the level. Meaning; there's now more for you kleptomaniacs to steal which I'm sure you'll have a field day with. Be sure to also have fun stealing all the paintings of the wall within the mansion.

Programming Section:

When it comes to the programming part, we've been hard at work implementing the game flow and a fully finished game loop. We added all the necessary screens within the game such as the main menu, a win screen and finally a timer counter. This should all now hopefully help to round up the game a bit more, making it what we in programming like to call; Atomic. Meaning there's now an explicit start and end to this game. So now, you can officially beat your friends at this game, and then rub your victory right into their stupid little faces which, honestly? Isn't that the reason why we play games.

Raphael has been hard at working finishing off the pop-up action buttons within the level. We had gotten a common complaint within our feedback that its sometimes hard to keep track of all the controls within the level, so to this more subconciously we wanted to add a system whereby detecting when you are in range to perform the action, a little pop up will appear above the item telling you explicitly what button to press. 

Our Raphael has spend hours implementing this system and its finally done now! Also the main menu now includes a game info screen which has all the controls within it described. So don't even dare to come and complain that you don't know what buttons to press. It's now all rather very explicit. 

Meanwhile, Cristian has been hard at work implementing a final victory screen to make the experience of winning as rewarding as possible for you. And the feeling of losing, as somber as possible. To create it, he even dabbled a bit within the particle as well as animation systems that Unity provides. From the message spam and calls I've been getting from him, it seems like he had some good fun adding all of them into the finished product. And I, personally, had fun implementing the sound. What? You want to know what I'm talking about? Well then, find four of your friends and try out the game.

Finally, over at my side, I've been tasked with creating the main menu, adding in all the small visual effects within the game, and lastly finalizing the game flow, which means playing through the entire game fifteen times over to make sure that all the transitions work between the switches from one screen to another. Along with this I have also been tasked to add a timer counter within the level that will finish the game once it reaches zero. 

When it comes to the small visual effects, just keep your eyes spurned open, maybe you notice a small shake when you deposit something. Maybe you noticed the 3 second counter before you spawn in, or the fade to black when moving between screens. In short, I had been tasked finalizing all the visual elements within the gameplay, I hope my work doesn't go to waste.

For now, the screens might not look like much but we're hoping this will be just placeholders until either this week or during the polish sprint, we'll have finished UI assets and backgrounds to make use of. So for now, enjoy the very standard Unity buttons and font.

And that was all for this devlog, as you can see, we're reaching a point where we are starting to finalize everything for our game in preparation for the final sprint before the upload. Tensions are high and everyone is a bit on edge, but I've got a good feeling about this. All that we have to make sure is not to slack off anymore. But we'll see.