Introduction

We are so happy to see you checking up on our game's progress. As a gift of gratitude, we had our programmers prototype the game's mechanics and the artists provide visually stunning assets. Thanks to that, Kidults has made some decent progress!

This week was all about fun:

Does this look fun? Is the way this character walks fun?! Is the game fun?!?!

We'll let you decide for yourself, so strap in for this week's progress!

Coding

Procedural Movement

Until now we had a hard time deciding on the movement for both players. For the bottom player we decided we want prodcedural movemement and procedural movement we got thanks to David!

The first version of this was successful but had some issues. Our character looks more like a drunk teenager trying to get back home rather than a kid trying to sneak into a cinema.

When walking it looks good, but the moment we rotate the legs will not react properly due to the set parameters. The solution was to decrease the step size that you have to take so it can actually rotate. We went from 50 units (50cm) to 20 units. For rotation this works perfectly, but walking feels a bit weird.

Two solutions come to mind:

1. Change the code
2. Change the model & rig

We did not want to over-engineer a simple system, so we chose the latter (which took Patricjia no time!)

After switching to the updated assets, we simply separated the legs more. Now when we turn or rotate the distance between the left and right leg is big enough to take proper steps. The benefit of that is that it also looks funnier!

Look at him go up the stairs!

Hand steering

We had this brilliant idea of having our top player be controllable solely by it's hands. The player would use the left and the right joystick respectively in order to control the left and the right hand of the top child. We put Jakub, one of our programmers, to work and got the following!

Looks very cool! Though we doubt this will be fun.

First of all controlling each hand with a separate joystick is very counter-intuitive contrary to what one may think. You can play test it for yourself by downloading this week's build (Kidults-v0.2) from the front page. There the camera provides a top-down perspective for easier controls. This leads us into the next issue...

What about the camera? With this movement having a top-down view is the only reasonable solution, but it's not what we agreed on when deciding the camera's angle.

We will be revsiting the movmement for the top player and either stick with this solution, but more refined, or come up with an alternative. One idea that comes to mind is simply leaning the top player with one joystick in the desired direction. This may sound boring at first, but we'll never know until we have tried it!

Art

Our artists were working on the Art bible, making different level blockouts, trying out shaders, lighting and also helping programmers with providing them with test models and rigs. 

Blockouts

Akshit and Patricija made blockouts as it is important to understand how the level will work. We also wanted to test the overall look of the cinema and explore ways to make it more engaging. Our shapes mainly focus on guiding the player while maintaining level readability, ensuring minimal camera rotation for a smoother experience.

Textures

We've been experimenting with textures, focusing on how they work for our characters. Patricija created one of the child characters and brought it into Substance Painter to test the texture workflow. Our goal is to keep things quick and efficient, so she used the low poly mesh to bake. This allows us to generate an Ambient Occlusion map (AO) as well as World Space Normals which help us in creating the gradients.

For props and environments we're aiming for soft gradient textures as a foundation with additional details added manually.

Patricija also developed a base Smart Material that integrates the AO and World Space Normal gradients. This setup will help the artists speed up the texturing process and maintain consistency within the enviornment, characters and props.

Shaders

The base shaders were already provided in the last devlog and now it's time to actually make it look good. We want this to attract people because of the way it looks. Len provided this cute scene to see how everything looks. The blockouts were made by Akshit and Patricjia. 

Len also made some basic blockouts and props to test emissive materials and fill up the scene. 

We were thinking the night scene is the direction to go in, as it's more logical and honestly more pretty. Now we can REALLY experiment with the lighting like Len did here. 

The textures of the children looked extremely good with the shader. It gives an outline and makes them more visible just like we wanted. Unfortunately we probably won't be able to do this because the simple-prototype-coat-mesh takes all the attention... However, we will look into possible solutions.

Thanks for tuning in...

... and see you next week in the third devlog!