Yet another week has passed and we are currently into the second week of development. Prepare to be amazed with this weeks progress, DISCLAIMER don’t sweat it if you are not wowed ☺.

Animation

On the topic of animation, we added a skeleton to our characters. The skeleton serves as a prerequisite to start animating the characters. We are currently using one rig setup which in turn produces one skeleton. Fortunately this skeleton is a one size fits all and will provide all our characters of a skeleton. To produce this rig we opted for Mixamo, our artists then gracefully edited that rig to fit our needs. This service provides rigs for humanoid characters, these pack a bit of overhead since our models don’t have knees ~| elbows, so that could be clipped. Following image illustrates that this solution isn’t a 100% fit, but it gets very close.

Particles

Jeopardy: This is a very experimental section of the blogpost, in this section i’ll ask you one trivial question, here it is: “What’s a co-op party game without a sh*tload of particles ?”. Well let me tell you, you simply need a ton of them. On that note we would like to announce that we added 2 particles, both regarding fire. We created a fire extinguisher particle and it’s counterpart fire. You might be thinking why exactly we added these first, well we simply needed them for the interactables and tasks so there's that.

Interactables

As promised last week we finally added working examples of our interactables and they are very fun if we say so ourselves. We chose to implement two interactables that have some resemblance to each other namely the broom and the fire extinguisher. The hard part about implementing these interactables was enabling the task system to talk with the interactable objects. To solve this we used a messenger class that registers messages from both the task system and the respective interactables, these messages than get dispatched to all the linked subsystems, or eachother in this example. The newly created tasks now handle the spawning of objects while the interactables interact components handle the ‘deletion’ of them. This system works flawlessly and we plan on using it for all our interactables given they can be solved this way.

Level Editing

As for level editing, our level designer started to move up from the sketches and blockout and is now adding in all of the currently available assets. Basically a first pass over the level, many other passes will have to follow in his footsteps though.

Music design

This might be a bit of an odd category since neither of us four know how to design sound. That’s why we asked for a little bit of help, a friend of one of the programmers willingly agreed to creating the ambient/theme sounds as long as he gets credit. We would like to thank him up front by dedicating the section of the blogpost to him :D.

Next week

You’ve reached the end of this blogpost, but don’t mourn we will be here next week. On that note we would like to notify you on what we plan on doing in that week. The programmers will mainly focus on getting 2 additional interactables working, namely the fax and coffee machine. Our artists will put add the supervisor model/rig and provide us with some extra animations regarding punch, hit and interact, next to this we will need to put some extra focus on the level.