Introduction

Hey! Thanks for dropping by. We’re wrapping up Sprint 1 this week. Lots of progress, a few bumps, and some solid wins. Here is a quick look at what we have been working on.

Coding

This week coding didn not have many advancement but there was some work to be done for the AI before we can end this sprint AI tasks. David refactored the AI code to be more simplistic and use the state tree with custom AI tasks, now after the AI finishes purchasing a ticket they start behaving like normal customers walking around the first section of the game where they purchase snacks and walk around!

Art

Vertex Animations

The Vertex Animations was a real challenge that Patricija tackled with our programmer David. At the start Patricija rigged all the NPCs manually, but when she started to animate them, it became clear that it was too time consuming and would not give the quality we wanted.  She realised that Mixamo could be perfect for this and much easier to accomplish a good quality result. After exporting the animations to Blender and generating a Vertex Animation Texture with an addon, she brought it all into the engine and built a custom material. Since we had not done vertex animations before, we hit a few walls, like one where the animation only played a single frame, at least we tought so. After digging in, we figured out that scaling was the issue and multiplying some values by 100 in the material fixed it. We did a few performance tests and we were really happy with the result, as our performance hit 60FPS on a RTX 4070 graphics card with a whole army of the NPCs.

Lighting

Patricija adjusted the lighting throughout the level, starting with more neutral lighting and gradually shifting to vibrant, arcade style colors towards the end. This change helps create a sense of progression and builds visual excitement as players move forward.

Texturing planned

Len’s been busy mapping out all the walls and floors we’ll need across the levels, planning out what needs to be made and starting the hunt (and build) for the right ones. We’re making sure not to lose sight of the game’s signature vintage look and that funky cool lighting that gets more intense and vibrant the deeper you go into a level, just as the challenge ramps up. It’s all connected!! 

Texturing

Akshit started with the texturing for the first stage of our level, which is the hallway and the Ticket counter, along with some level decorations like sign boards, while also testing out what style and patterning would fit to give it a funky and vintage look at the same time.