Introduction

Welcome to this weeks weekly devlog! We are currently in the middle of sprint 2, which means we are slowly nearing the end. You know what that means! Production is going full speed and we are a little bit sleep deprived, a little bit tired but still super excited to share this weeks progress!

Coding

Our game's whole theme resolves around two kids under a trench coat. As you might have noticed, we don't have a trench coat. We had to make a change to that. Jakub spent almost all of his time this week on experimenting with the implementation of it. At first, it seemed trivial to use cloth simulation. After all, Unreal should make it pretty trivial to work... right?

Well, not entirely. When enabling cloth simulation, the coat did not react to the players movement, even though the collision were set up correctly. After playing around with it for an ungodly amount of time, Jakub decided to try and use an animation blueprint instead. Since the top kid's movement is entirely simulated, that was the only sane approach to getting it's pose. What he ended up doing is clone the rig of the top kid onto the trench coat and import the coat without creating a separate skeleton and physics asset for it. Instead, in the import settings, he selected the top kid's skeleton and physics asset. This allowed the animation blueprint to use the top kid's skeletal mesh as a source for the copy pose from mesh function inside the animation blueprint. The result is not ideal; the coat feels rubbery and stiff. This is what we have for now, but we will continue improving it!

Moving forward with more programming stuff, David completed a couple of tasks (11) so there is a bit to cover, lets start with the fun stuff.

We now have step traces! It was supposed to be dust, but David quickly realized that if we wanted dust he would have to ask an artist to draw the dust or do it himself, and none of those were viable options at the time so now there are just small glowing particle traces!

Next is the main menu! We finally have a main menu an a character select menu. You can now choose which character you will be playing!

The art is still work on progress, this is just place holder, we promise that next time it will look better!

Next David refactored the AI a bit so there isnt much to say about that, there were a couple of bugs that had to be solved. One of the was that the AI will stop walking after reaching some point and never doing another task, but that is solved now!

The following task was implementing checkpoints! As contrary opinion for a lot of people, check points are not that hard to make, its just saving the state of the data in the Game Instance, and retrieving it in begin play. Now our artist can just place these nice collision boxes all around the level and create a checkpoint!

The next task was to refactor the animation system for some of the AI. One thing that David overlooked in the amazing VAT system that he proposed to be used for all the AI is that AI actually uses the world delta time, that means that if you try to have interaction with npc's you will never know at which exact frame the animation will start playing. If you still dont understand why that is an issue i will give the next example:

- Player approaches ticket seller, ticket seller has to play animation Anim_GiveTicket but due to the world delta being not 0 the animation will start at some frame between 0 and 30

We dont want that, we want our ticket seller to play the animation starting from frame 0 to frame 30! This is the main reason now some characters use skeletal meshes instead of VAT's.

This was not really a hard task either for David the previous system was already pretty modular when he made it so he only had to make some small changes like creating an animation blueprint for the idle state and then instead of changing the material he would play a montage.

The next task that David implemented was the another task was the ticket buying, then ticket checking, since they are 2 separate tasks that work differently we had to split them.
The ticket checker not only checks the ticket but he actually doesnt let you pass! it will not open the gate for you unless you have a valid ticket!

The next one is a fun one, took a bit longer that the other task that David implemented but the artist wanted this one, so what doesn't do a programmer to make their artist happy?
Its emojis, now all the AI character support emojis! If you are playing this build i recommend you going to the ticket checker without a ticket and trying to interact with him, you will have a surprise :)

Last thing David is willing to talk about in this devlog is the game over screen, when you reach the end of the game it will show some nice rolling credits like in a movie theater :)

Stay tuned for next week of programming, you are going to love what David has prepared!

Art

Farewell to Vertex Animations (For Cinema Workers)

We had to part ways with Patricija’s vertex animations for the cinema workers. It was a tough call, but at least Patricija was able to quickly export basic bone based versions instead. (No worries we will still use Vertex Animations for NPCs!)

Coat

Besides our lovely characters, another important thing is the coat. Patricija updated the coat model, so it also has some nice details like buttons and stiching. She also rigged the coat, but in the end the programmers had to make some adjustments to it so it works in the game. She plans to texture the coat during the next week after we know for sure, that the coat works and wont be changed later.

Level dressing

Patricija made the barriers that are used for the players to get in the snack room. They can only access this arrea by having a ticket. In fron of the barrier there are ticket checkers that check the ticket.

Patricija also made smaller props, that will be placed around the level, like cans and drinks. They also have squished versions, so we can create a lively and messy enviornment.

Patricija was managing the Arcade Zone and tying everything together. She made Arcade Zone signs, the rug, Air Hockey and boxing machine. She also finished placing posters made by Len throughout the level, assigning textures to the walls and placing other finished props so our Cinema starts filling up.

Akshit worked mainly on texturing and model few small props for this Week on NPCs and main Snackstation .