Sprint is sprinting

These past weeks have been crucial to adding core elements of the game, such as local multiplayer, a spawning system, adding all the textures and models and the element of VOILENCE! (Punching) 

Art

All bird and player penguin models have been modelled, unwrapped and textured. Some scaling issues arose, but were fixed afterwards, with implementing the birds in the pick up spawner, so there is some visual proof our pick ups aren't just glowing spheres. 

Owl:

Hawk:

Hummingbird:

Parrot:

Balloons:

And last but not least, our main characters, our dearest cadettes:

You can now dress them up in different colors!

There were some scaling errors we unfortunately caused, so it might take some more time to fix the aftermath. For next time it is important  to immediately scale the base shape of a mesh to the correct dimentions, and compare it in the project itself immediately. You live and you learn.

Additionally, a cloud meshes were modelled and unwrapped. All of the clouds follow the same symbolic shape and have very similar pattern on them. They only differ in size and overall shape.


All of the clouds together:

Programming

One of the main focuses for this week was spawning of the pickups. Instead of only being able to spawn on one certain location, they will now be spawned on clouds going from one side of the level to the other, getting transferred along the way. This mechanic stays closely connected to the theme of the game and also provides a more interesting gameplay.

Everyting of the pickups, from spawning to the pickups themselves, is completely customizable and ready for playtesting, except for maybe one minor detail: they can't be put to use yet.

Challenges

Somewhere along the way a ball was dropped with communication. The team divided in their own parts and worked on their own tasks with little to no communication. Tasks were placed in the testing fase for weeks without resolution even now. This was paired with everyone's lives taking a bit more precedence during the Spring break. 
One lesson to take away from this is not to fall in such a trap. Because you have more time, does not mean you should procrastinate and delay playtesting features, which dependent on feedback.

During development placeholder meshes weren't used, THIS WAS A MASSIVE MISTAKE! Somewhere in development the waterfall technique was deployed regarding character design where the model, texturing and materials were made before any of them were added to a feature. This came with a huge problem of programming and art not lining up. From colliders to speed and distances, all of the parameters were invalidaded due to this oversight.