The first sprint is over! Our game is slowly taking shape. Last week we figured out, that our biggest problem is still the balancing of the mom and the babies. To make none of the sides overpowered we have to add more functions and tweak already existing mechanics. The other problem we had was a consistence in the artstyle. We had to work more together as a team and take a closer look on the models of the other.

Art

And so we are coming to our artistic part of the game. Many parts of the kitchen are modeled and ready to get used. 

While we modeled and textured our assets we occurred some problems. For some objects our polycount was way to high. And N-Gons! N-Gons everywhere!! After cleaning up our meshes, the coloring and texturing went fast and smooth. Only the stove gave us a hard time again. It just wouldn't bake and Google wasn't helping either. The problem was a simple human error, where somebody forgot to place the unwrapped UV in the right place.

Furthermore we started rigging and animating. To get back into the topic we animated the oven in the kitchen, so the babies will be able to crawl in the oven and hide from the mother.

The other topic is rigging the baby and the mother. We never worked with human characters before, so in every topic, also modeling, unwraping and texturing it is a trial and error.  The first skeleton of the baby is half done and yet really shaky and not optimised to use for animations. We have to put a lot more effort into the the rigging than we thought. Here you can see that our baby really needs some help with its legs.

Programming

First of all we needed to change the speed of the babies. To get them down from Speedy Gonzales to actually catchable babies, we regulated the speed to the half.

Another big topic in this week was the Ui. Last week we implemented the dash for the babies, but the mechanic was not balanced enough, so we added a dashbar. This bar allows you to only dash, if the green bar is in between the red marks.  

Another implemented Ui is the circle above the interactive objects. It shows you if the object is activated and how long it needs to get activated. In addition it shows how many babies you need to activate the item. The game has the mechanic, that the babies have to work against each other to get points, but they also have to work together to win the game against the mother.

We also had to make a game loop. Most of the work was already done because we implemented the scenes and the menu behaviors but we had to finish it for this sprint. Thus, we have a start, end, option and controls screens ready to use in the game.

But for the end of the game we though that we had a sloppy system because it was just a timer, and if this timer reaches to its end, the game stops... So after getting feedback about it, we tried to reproduce one of the examples used in the meeting to show how we could do it. We ended up remaking our point system in a way that there will be a chaos system. If the babies go crazy, chaos goes high; If the mom is able to calm the babies, the chaos lowers. The end goal is either to have a full or an empty chaos bar.

Finally, the playpen is working! It took some time, but now the babies stay in their playpen after the mother put them in. But the babies can help each other out of the prison. The player can activate the help if he stands on top of the red carpet under the playpen and after a short delay the other baby(babies) gets(get) back in the game.

Bugs

We tried out some shaders in Unity. The goal was to create an outliner shader, that will show our baby as a silhouette , even if it's behind an object. But Unity did not wanted to work as we wanted. The outcome was a row of alien, invisible and possessed demon babies. Here a collection of the best ones. 

Tasks for next week

• Finish the rigging of the baby and the mom
• start animating the baby
• decide for a nice ground and wall texture
• implement models more in the game
• define more items like the chairs