[Devlog]Production Sprint 1 Week 1

-The first week of the production sprint is over!This means the group has started building the Octopi in space concept into a full game! Our focus now as team is to start building the game from the bottom up and not rush things to test mechanics(although we will be back in this phase in a few weeks!).

-Our experience so far with the Unity engine is pretty smooth, we still need some time to get adjusted but it feels much more familiar because of its scripting environment and with a huge plus of better compile teams.Of course the lack of a material editor (such as Unreal’s) puts our team’s artists at a slight disadvantage.On the other hand because of the game’s art style, we most probably won’t need to create really fancy shaders for our game and as a big plus we get to learn the material/shader pipeline of a new to us editor!Although that brings us also to the question:

1)Should we use Unity’s newer beta version which contains a material/shader editor?

Even though our games requirements aren’t that high and most probably we won't use most of the features of the Unity engine,not using a stable version can prove problematic at the most inappropriate times.The best way to find out if it is a good idea is to try another version of our dev version on Unity 2018.1b version and see if it’s safe for our project’s scope.

2)How many weaponized hamster balls should we implement to make the game more interesting?

This issue arose between the group’s members and everyone agreed in implementing a few balls every week and playtesting them all together. This way we will know if some of these items have a place in the final version of the game.This is an important topic mainly because the weaponized hamster balls will affect the interaction the players are going to have between them and at the same time make it more interesting and fun.

3)Should we add an additional mechanic in the game to make it more interesting?

While discussing the topic of the previous question , our group came up with the idea of being able to consume the ball that the player has grabbed and also being able to feed them to the snake. All of the above actions will add a new layer of strategy and maybe spice up the core gameplay without making it much more complicated. Of course all of the above will need some playtesting before giving the green light.

4)How should we approach the rig/animation of the models in relation to the gameplay.

Grabbing and throwing should also naturally be translated as animations in game but these animations could prove to be a bane to the game’s mechanics (collisions while attaching the ball to a socket) and also a hard problem for a team that has to tackle it for the first time.We need to see as a team which the best approach to this problem is.In the end it is in our best interest to be able to implement the core mechanics as smooth as possible and have them work without them being sloppy.There might be a need to simplify some of these animations.

Plans for the second week of the first production spring.

With the first week of the production sprint already over, we need to speed up and wrap up all of the main core mechanics, and start focusing on other things such as some simple ui elements and team/player selection menus. Adding more gameplay options(in the form of weaponized hamster balls) and playtesting it as much as possible!Another busy week ahead!