It's already the fifth devlog as we finish up the first sprint. In this sprint we build a lot of robust systems, created colourful assets, tested eachother's code, played eachother's system. We gave feedback and adapted were needed. Sometimes there were difficulties, with code, assets or personal, but all were overcome. And in the end we feel like we have a very sturdy base to keep building on in the next sprint.

The Artists

Kirill didn't make any new bots but focused on a logo and UI elements for the start screen.  The start screen took a bit longer than expected because Kirill didn't draw hidden parts of the UI at first, after some feedback from Lukas and fixing the issue. The UI elements were ready to use in the engine.

Kirill also worked on designing a logo for our game. After discussing some ideas with the team last Wednesday, Kirill started to make some sketches.

After making a lot of sketches, trying out different ideas and asking feedback from both his colleague artist and the programmers, Kiril made a final design based on option A.

Inias on the other hand was finishing up the props and collisions for the arena.  Creating the props went rather quickly according to Inias, since he had a clear idea of what to do after creating temporary props last week. Inias made all props in one large blender file, to make sure proportions were correct and colours weren't clashing.

After some discussion with Michiel, Inias also made sure to setup the collisions for all the props correctly. One prop Inias is particularly proud of, is the gate where the enemies spawn from:

What rests now is some proper lighting and more decorations to bring the arena to life. And of course, the audience! Shadow isn't fighting those blood thirsty bots for nothing!

Inias also started work on rigging the main character, next sprint he'll be able to animate it and make the game look much more dynamic.

The Programmers

The first thing Lukas did, was making it so the bots now use the baked NavMesh of the level instead of just mindlessly moving towards the player.  This took some trial and error to get right and even after finishing it, a weird bug came up that Michiel fixed after coming to gether with Lukas.

Lukas also worked on the power-ups system. While the main system is very robust and ready for use, some of the individual power-ups still could use some improvements but are very close to finished.

To add some visual feedback to the game, Lukas also made script for Camera Shake. No reason to reinvent the wheel, Lukas took inspiration from Brackeys' Camera Shake script and adapted it to make it work in this version of Unity and added a smoothness modifier to make a shake more or less violent.

Finally, Lukas translated Kirill's UI elements to a layout in Unity and added some code to it to make it functional. This took a bit longer than expected, because Lukas deleted some default keybindings a few week ago needed to make the UIs EventSystem work.

Michiel, as usual, did a lot of work again and focused on completing all his Sprint 1 tasks. 

He started by taking a break from the loot system and began work on the ranged combat system. The player can now wield a bow and shoot arrows at the bots. There's a simple quick attack, that shoots a single arrow. And just like the other weapons, there's  a heavy but risky ranged attack as well, shooting five arrows in quick succession.

The bots use the same ranged combat system to shoot projectiles at the player, the bots will currently also run out of ammo after shooting for some time.

Both the Melee and Ranged heavy attacks stop the player from moving and make the controller rumble, making it so the player is more aware they are performing a heavy attack. The player is able to run out of ammo but can replenish it by killing bots, again making sure the player is constantly fighting.

After ranged combat, Michiel went back to the loot system and basically started from scratch as he didn't like the direction it was going. It of course took some extra time, but the end result was worth it. The player is now able to get a full armour set. and random weapons. As there is currently no transition between rounds, the way to try out this system is by pressing the Y button. Currently, all items will be automatically equipped.

Finally, Michiel started on an Animation Manager the artists can use to bring the game to life. Animations will be called when events in other scripts are thrown. Since there are currently no actual animations, Michiel added some very simple placeholder animations to show of the system.

Everything went really smoothly, The loot system could have been discussed more in depth during the design phase and sprint planning. As there was more work to it than initially planned and schedualled.

The Build

This week’s build contains all the systems planned for this current sprint. You are able to test melee combat, ranged combat and your powerups. You can cycle through weapons and armour by pressing the Y button, this will provide your character with a random loot drop which is automatically equipped to the player character.

There are some animations present to give some visual feedback when you shoot/hit an enemy. These are placeholder animations but will help to playtest the game.

We are aware of problems with collisions and bot/player movement. This will be addressed during the second sprint to make it as smooth as possible.

If you encounter any problems or have suggestions, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment we want to improve our game as much as possible to make it something special.

Next Up

Before we move onto the final vital parts of our game, we will take some time to make sure all systems work well together and some of the more annoying bugs are fixed. While there will be a sprint to polish everything, it will be much more fun for us to build on top of systems that do not contain the occasional bug.