Hi folks!

(*insert quirky sentence here*). All jokes aside we re-started our game development cycle, and are currently one week into it. This meant setting up Unreal project again along with our source control and we restructured our folder directory.

Hacknplan

First things first, we filled our backlog to the brim with all the tasks that still await completion. This was a very tedious task since it required us to really think about all the bits and pieces that make up for the final game.

Physics

We brought back the Throwables™, the items which you can pick up and throw away. Seeing these have physics on them, they tend to give funny results when meddled with. Following image illustrates what happens when a model is not up to scale, has a larger size and a heavier weight. For illustration purposes, the small red plates on the floor each weigh an astounding 600 kg according to Unreal Engine. We thought this was funny so here it is:

Art

On the art side of things we swapped out the good old prototype character for Walter with 2 new characters, namely Travis and Douglas. These characters better fit our artstyle, and are more polished than the prototype character. Since we started anew we abandoned all props. The plan was to get these props back in in the first two weeks of development, but this didn’t quite work out since our prop designer has the flu.

Class Hierarchy

As for the programmers, we started rethinking our class hierarchy to better fit the game design and the engines inner workings. We are talking minor things here like making object derive from one another to make code more readable altogether, and creating components for the respective interact, sabotage and repair actions (basically highly secret stuff). We had to remove our  traces after we used that whiteboard that’s for sure.

Level Design

Since thursday is our unofficial kinda official team work day, we get spend some extra time in the Hive, this allows us to rapidly fire some ideas back and forth to further improve the quality of our game, this week’s session was mainly focused on getting back on track, this also meant a reiteration of the games level. We rounded up our heated discussion and ended up with 3 viable map designs which we then gracefully merged into one hell of a level. Our level takes place in a skyscraper, this opens up some new game mechanics, like throwing someone out of the window.

WYDT Team!