Devlog 6: Production Sprint 1 - Finish

Programming

This week was a lot of bug fixing and feature adding. Like the checkpoint system and position of the player. The code is starting to get messy because we don’t use a observer or event queue. This will be fixed next week.

Camera

Yes, the camera was back for another look at it. The spring arm can now ignore certain tags, so the spring arm doesn’t do weird things through invisible objects. This was necessary for the checkpoint system and will be useful for some obstacles.

Checkpoint

There is a hidden checkpoint system in place now to check if the player didn’t skip certain parts and to calculate the distance from the next checkpoint. Currently checkpoints are placed at the beginning of an obstacle and at the start piece and later the end piece.

Position

With the usage of the new checkpoint system, we can calculate the players position in the game. This is displayed in the right top corner of the screen.

Baby physics

The baby had some major issues in previous build. The collision was not good, and the location of the baby was discarded if the ball came back. This is now all fixed and I temporarily removed the baby collision with the ball to test if this feels more right. We would love to get some feedback about it!

Spawn points

When the match starts every player spawns on his own point. So no longer messy collision when you start and spawn in each other. For next sprint I will add a lock at spawn with a count down so you have some preparation time.

That’s it for this week and I am excited to keep y’all updated next week!

Art

Obstacles

The majority of the obstacles have been completed, including the ramp, start piece, jump, vortex, bridge, and wheel. However, the remaining obstacles, namely the trampoline, bridge, and end piece, still require attention.

While several pieces share a common texture (resembling red bricks), each had to be meticulously unwrapped and textured individually. Additionally, two new textures were developed for the bumpers, wheel, and vortex.

The final chains required for the track have been designed, unwrapped, and textured. Their implementation now only requires a procedural approach to complete the task. They will be used to resemble the track hanging form above.

Procedural Generation

The track generation is good as complete but not implemented yet. Testing will be done after sprint 3's build and if everything works correctly it will be regenerated and added. The new version includes a better LOD-instancing, a correct collision mesh by Unity standards and some overall bugfixes. Of all bugfixes, the most noticeable are obstacles no longer being able to overlap and obstacles no longer being able to be instanciated on curved parts of the track.

Surroundings generation. In order to make the environment a little more interesting, we have decided to generate building-like shapes under and around the track. These would be boring enough so it doesn't catch the player's attention but still feel more intruiging than a never ending void.

Skybox

This week we developed the skybox which will be our background for this project. The hand painted background is made in Photoshop and implemented in unity as an panoramic skybox which reaches the effect of the buildings deforming and reaching above the tracks. The midground buildings are also in development and being built.

Sound

Hey everyone, it’s that time of the week again. It’s time for some sound talk! Final week of the sprint means having to wrap up all the remaining stuff I had left to do this sprint, which was finishing the player related sounds. Implementing a missile launch and explosion sound, a ball shattering sound and created a sliding effect which was probably the most painstaking sound to make so far, trying to make a sound that doesn’t sound too noticeably repetitive is difficult, First having to find an audio clip that doesn’t have too many quick volume changes or obvious/recognizable parts in it. But I somehow managed to get it done in the end and I’m proud of it. That’s about it for my segment.