After the Easter Holiday the work on Sprint 2 continued. Shadow now has animations when moving and attacking and the bots also have an animations. 

Kirill spent his time on making a rig and animations for all three bots. The Ostrich Bot has a slinging animation, which Kirill found challenging. So he took his time to try out multiple approaches before finishing up the final animation.

After animating and rigging, Kirill continued with designing the UI. This time focussing on the HUD and the Settings screen. When he was finished Lukas set up the UI in Unity and created a script for the various systems to plug into. Finally, Michiel connected all necessary systems with the HUD.

Inias encountered some technical difficulties when trying to add a bloom post-processing effect along the shader adding an outline to the player. For the moment, we decided to keep the bloom out of the game and will look into it more in the next week.

Inias also worked on the level lighting and made it much softer and has brighter shadows.

He also worked on the audience. Instead of rigging up these birds, we decided to place them in Unity as is and animate certain properties of the models (scale, rotation...)  to create a an audience that is alive. The audience will eventually be seated on the branches around the arena.

Finally, Inias also started on VFX and created some simple placeholders to get to know how VFX work in Unity. Everything went rather smoothly and Inias feels confident about creating the final visual effects for Nest Wars.

Lukas started this sprint by reworking the Bot system. Not only by cleaning up the code but also by adding an Idle state to the bot. Everything is configurable, so we will be able to finetune the movement of our bots much more. Some bots will have better vision or walk longer distance when idling. The new system didn't come without it's own bugs either, some of them Lukas got stuck on and needs some feedback from Michiel. Something they will do in the last week of the sprint. Despite the issues currently in there, the new system is already much more promising.

The first thing Michiel did was setting up the game for multiple rounds. This required some refactoring in some of the managers since some of these managers control a part of the flow of the game and contain vital data. The progression system now support a difficulty increase and replayability.  Rounds start off with basic enemies at a single spawn point. After each wave, more gates will spawn and more difficult bots will spawn from those gates. There's also an overarching Round Manager keeping track of the state of the game and the specifics for each individual round.

Then he went back to the post round systems and started to integrate the Post Round UI made by Lukas with all the necessary systems. This of course took some time to refactor already existing systems so everything worked well together.

After working on the post round systems, Michiel focussed on the animations. Most animations are called from code at different points during the game. Some changes to the prefabs had to be made to support those animations.

After this it was time to integrate the player HUD and have all information be pulled towards the HUD script. The game now has a responsive HUD for the player with all relevant information to be used by the player.

Finally, Michiel also did some minor optimisations and added some prefabs and code to make working with this project easier and to ensure multiple scenes using the same prefabs does not lead to out of sync files or errors.

With the latest version of the game a sync/corrupted file error occured on our P4V server. It took some time to find the file causing the problem but in the end everything got changed and no data was lost.

The Build

In the current version of the build the player can walk through most of the intended game loop. The player will spawn with a sword equipped an no armour. The players task is to close all gates active in the arena and destroy all bots left in the arena after closing the gates.

Upon clearing a round, the player will get his post round report. Here the player will see what item he has acquired from completing the round and what powerup he has gotten. After accepting the items, he can continue the game with the new acquired loot.

The game will get harder the further in the game the player is, with higher round numbers more gates will spawn, and each gate will have more difficult enemies spawning from them.

In this devlog you will find 2 builds, one of the builds is a variant of the main game where the gates only spawn 1 enemy at a time. This is to give you a quick way to test out the main systems and round progression without having to sink in a lot of time clearing tons of enemies like in the normal game.

The second build is the current main version of the game. Here there is a higher spawn limit for enemies from each gate, which will give more of a challenge to the player.

(Disclaimer: We know there are still some bugs in the bot movement, they do sometimes seem to be doing weird and unintended things. Our apologies for that.)

Please enjoy our new build, if you run into any problems please let us know.

Up Next

Next week the artists will focus on vfx and bringing some more life to the game. Lukas will will start on the Audio Manager and Michiel will finish the Crowd Approval system and add traps to the game. Together, they will also look into the bot system and fix the last few remaining issues.