Let us say this: we are really, really happy the packaging of the game went smoothly, and we can present you a working build right off the bat. Last week was hell. The time the two programmers spend on solving this particular bit probably totals around 10 hours. Well, it got fixed, and we at least learned not to trust certain functions that UE gives us.

First bits of UI

This time, the first thing you will probably notice is the presence of a UI. No, the buttons sadly don’t do anyting yet, you do not have any skills. What does work, however, is the health- and researchbar. You can finaly see how close you are to messing up and dying!
Apart from that, while there is still some work on it, this is the look we are going for. Nice, clean sci-fi stuff that’s not too complex. The icons are about finished, with just a tad bit of color added to them to make them shine a little bit more. After that, it’s all about getting them into UE and making them scale properly.
Another thing you might notice, is that some enemies have a (rather scuffed) healthbar floating over their heads. These enemies are the Forest enemies, and getting the healthbar to rotate correctly has proven to be a nightmare. Well, this will get fixed eventually, and once this is fixed the other enemies will also get the healthbars.

More enemies!

The purple horror from last week got some new skins:
If you want to see the 3D models on sketchfab, you can click this link.
As you can see, every biome has its own variation, and that will make more sense later on, when these enemies get their skills. The player needs to be able to see which enemy can do what, and with this, that problem will get solved!
Then ofcourse, these enemies will need proper animations. While the purple one does have working animations, the ideal situation is that every enemy uses the same skeleton, and thus the same animations and the same blueprint that drives those animations. Sadly, Mixamo made completely different skeletons for all the enemies, so we will look into what our best option is: having the enemies run on different animation blueprints, or having the artists skinning the models manually. The first option is a lot of extra files and copypasting around of code, the last option will probably take quite some time. We also experimented a bit with retargeting of the skeletons, but that largely resulted in the first option.

Other meshes

Apart from the enemies, quite a bit more was made in the last week.
To start with, our player is basically finished: it has materials, is rigged, and has some basic animation.
On top of that, most of the smaller things also have been made. Think about health pickups, research pickups, bombs… Most of these have yet to be implemented in the game, but you will see the bombs drop - make sure you defuse them before they explode! Unlike in the protoype, the tiles won’t disappear immediatly, as they also have health, but watch out with leaving too many bombs lying around. The defusing of the bombs also got fixed, as in last week’s build you could not pick them up.
The last thing that has been added, although not completely finished yet, is the ice environment. The texture isn’t finished yet - right now, it’s just flat colors - but the model is, and it is in the game already.
In the meantime, the artists are working on the research camp, and some discussion on how to properly get it into the gameworld has popped up, as we can’t exactly have icespikes or trees growing out of the roof of the camp. What we ended up deciding should make sure that there will eb no overlap. We will need to change some code to make it work out, but it shouldn’t be too difficult. Shouldn’t. Famous last words?

Next week

We were hoping to have finished the last bit of the base for our enemies, but as the build took such a ridiuclous long time last week, this hasn’t happened yet, and so that is the very first thing the programmers will work on. As for the artists, they will finish up what they currently are working on (like the enemy animations, extra animations on the player, finishing the camp etc). Some new enemy types will probably also be started, depending on how far they get with the other things that need finishing up.
And we lied a little bit in the title. This time, we have about 3 weeks because Easter Holiday is included in this “one” week of the sprint. That means that technically, we should be able to get quite a bit done. If we reach some kind of milestone in that time, we might give you another update during the Holiday - it’s not as if “Holiday” means we will be sitting still, after all!