Hey you!

Welcome to the second week of our production phase. Where we are working on multiple things at the same time and everything is slowly coming together. Mechanics got tweaked and re-added (after we purged our hastily written prototype code), a playground is nearing completion and animations are nearly there. Let us summarize:

Level Transition:
We needed a smooth transition between scenes, in our case the starting classroom (functioning as the pre-game area) and the play area. To tackle that we made a PhaseOut effect between the loading of the scenes. Later on this will be replaced with a loading screen with some hints, jokes, facts, nuclear launch codes, ... You know, the usual.

Tagging:
Tagging is back! Run after your friends (and enemies) once again and try to tag them. The infamous dive made a comeback aswell, which is ideal to wake up your inner freerun-god. Tag 'em, tag 'em with style.

Tackling:
Tackling is back aswell. Annoy the other non-taggers by tripping them, or slide someone to their inevitable doom! Just be aware the tagger is watching, and the person you just betrayed will be coming after you.

Stamina:
Movement and all actions now cost stamina. Stamina regeneration is quick, making sure that your movement doesn't feel slowed down. The main function is to prevent those filthy button mashing creatures that keep jumping or sliding constantly while pretending to be a game-god.

Rope Start:
Because we ran into a lot of problems around the rope mechanic, we sadly have to admit that we moved it to next week.
The rope mechanic can be used by 2 players to trick other non-taggers or the tagger himself. When the other players collide with the rope they'll trip and fall(=immoblized for a second). It is however possible to jump over the rope which will lead to no penaltys as well as some extra points (and obvious swag-points ofcourse).

PhaseOutShader:
We will use this effect in combination with a big expending cloud to change the environment at runtime. So that we can change from a happy playground styled environment to a negative hellscape. This will be a way to visualize the boiling anger a tagger might experience when his (ex-)friends escape his reach again. 

Customisation:
Because we want each player to be able to choose a unique characteristic at the begin of the game. We will include hats,shirts,boots,... for the players to use, embrace and show dominance.
As we still have more than enough work with making the character and environments we don't have any real hats to show, yet. We do have a barren shrubbery. Which, let's be honest, would make a dashing hat. Right?

Environment:
The playground is nearing completion! We got a seesaw, a sandpit (with sandcastles), tires (what's a playground without some good old car tires), a slide, rocks to trip over and a crumbling island. Sounds like a schoolkid's paradise to me. Next up, the hellscape.

Character:
The base mesh of the main-character is finally done! Topology is fully optimized for best performance and complex skinning.
Everything is one mesh except for the eyes which are simple planes of 1 polygon each. Even with the low complexity in the eyes, we managed to get all the emotional expressions we wanted!

Also the rig for this character is worked out to make the animator's life very  easy. Simple switches for various settings are built into the rig to give control about the eyes, root motion and IK switches for the arms and legs .

By simply letting the planes cut through the head, the eyes get an angry expression. Setting an attribute to a driven key and BAM  the mood of the character changes in a matter of a click.

Blinking the eyes was even easier,  we just had to move the vertices close together. With float driven keys we got a smooth transition between open and closed eyes. More eye expressions will be added throughout the project, depending on what the animations require.

Because we're going to need some animations with and without root-motion, the rig includes a boolean switch. This create a fast and consistent  workflow!

OutlineShader:

Because we wanted our level to look more edged,
we will use a outline shader to express more depth into our environment. There are still some bugs, but we will fix them next week.

Until next week!
The Tag Team