This week we had some catching up to do again.
We really needed to get to the point of having  a working, decent game. We discussed a bit on how we are going to flesh out the movement by adding a secondary form of motion. We're still figuring out if we want a dash movement or a walljump. Possibly both. Or neither. The possibilities are endless!

One major addition to the game are the rotating towerdiscs. The overlord is able to activate these using the bumpers on his controllers, making the level change while the players are still on it.

We also have a kind of pipeline going on for the models we're making. They are all created with an offset to the center of the world allowing us to easily make the tower at the 0,0 position in our game. This means that, to design our level, we only have to change the height of the model or the rotation of it. 

Yannick:

This week i have been busy making the overlord character, making some more design decisions along the way. Now that I textured it in unreal  we can try and see if our existing rig works with the overlord as well. If not we'll also have to make a new rig.

Paulien:

After the feedback, we divided our most important tasks first. For me, that was making sure all naming conventions were correct and fixing these. I also made our art showcase, putting the props into the correct sublevels.

Once this was finished, I started on the animations for our main character. I first tried working with the original rig, but quickly noticed there needed to be some changes on it, which Maximiliaan made. I then animated the most important animations: idle, walk, run, jump, punch and get punched.

Florian:

The feedback was clear, we have to have a working build by next week and it has to include our wild idea to make the characters move circular around the tower. So here we go, while Maximiliaan and Robin went to work on the design of the tower I tried to refine the movement so we had everything (we were still missing a jump, quite important if you're making a platformer). 

As usual i would first spend an hour or two researching, watching tutorials, reading forum threads and articles to find the best solution for our problem or an angle from which I could tackle it optimally. This time i found out something that would fundamentally change the way we looked at our minions. In hindsight it seems stupid but with our lack of experience we didn't realize that making the minion a character blueprint in stead of a pawn blueprint would make our lives so much easier. But when we put it to the test and made a minion character with the same movement features as the pawn we could fix things like jumping, fall speed, hold to jump higher, and even left to right movement by checking or unchecking boxes and adjusting parameters. Robin came up with a system that would just utilise the left and right movement of the character class but adjust the position of the minion around the circumference of the circle each frame. Now we had elegant and modular movement in a circular fashion.

Next to this i did some more tweaking and refining, I discovered a node called the timeline node that could make things like trap springs easy to implement and included it in the trap. Also went back to my good old camera to finish distance calculations and made it extremely modular so i could just tweak variables to dictate how far the camera starts, how far it will  go, if it has a Z axis offset, etc.

All in all i'm very happy with how this week went. I made a lot of progress and did some good research. Just a pitty that some things like the trap chose to break down at the end so we are still figuring that out but our game is starting to look the way we envisioned it and that's very encouraging. 

Maximiliaan

It was time for animations,  but we realized our character rig kinda sucked. So I went ahead and redid it properly in Maya, to make Paulien's life a little easier.

The main differences are the leg IK, decent controllers, and much better skinning.

Also the trims are FINALLY done, so time for some asset texturing! 

Never thought I'd get so sick of painting.