Heya!

Welcome to the final week of our first production sprint. More stuff got added, feedback was applied and another step towards completion has been taken. Let's dive in!

Rope:
We finally got our hands on a good enough joint system for our rope. It looks a bit too buggy right now for in the buildscene, but we can see a bright future for this mechanic.

Animations:
The first and most important animations got there blockout. We had to be very considered about the all the poses. The body of the character is very much out of proportion, which makes it hard to make readable and dynamic poses. After this first fase we learned alot about how to properly animate the character.

Character Rig: 
 During the animation fase we discovered that stretching of the arms, fingers and body would give an extra edge on the rig. So with a few contraints we made it happen.

Animation Implementation (rolls):
We got our first new animations for the new model, one of our artists created.
Most of the things are already fully functional, some features are still to be implemented.

12 custom roll animations to make the blending seamlessly.

Outline Shader Fix:

Previous week we had a problem with the depthbuffer displaying black artifacts on some of the polygons. We changed the DepthTreshold from a fixed value to a value that is calculated by taking the polygon normal and calculating if it's a polygon in sight or if its planar, flat in view of the camera.

Falling Mechanics:
Because our previous feedback said that the breathing space/play space was too small and had a lot of collisions along the way. We decided to drop special mechanics into the game at runtime. This way we can change the practical environment without using up too much space.

Island Optimisation:
In our previous practices we used a convex mesh collider on every part of the island.
Now we extracted the upper planes of the island set on their the convex mesh collider and we attached it back to the children of the island itself, now only the collision works on top of the above island.

Overview shot of the environment:

Classroom:
As a starting pre-game area where you can choose your hat, run around and start the game we wanted a classroom. We quickly made a blockout to get a general feel for the area. For now it still feels too much like a highschool, so expect a major overhaul of this zone (and added textures ofcourse).

See you next week!
The Tag Team