Hello there and welcome to our second devlog! 

To be quite honest this week has held a lot of surprises for us. There's a little ghoul going around throwing rocks at our team and a couple of them managed to hit their targets, indisposing some of our team mates,  but we're trying our best to keep up the progress on our little game in spite of that. 

Art

We've brainstormed around the general feel and look of HOT POTATO. We were quite torn between going for an edgy, more angular style with a bit more punch to it or a round and friendly approach with vibrant colors. After debating for a bit amongst ourselves we settled for the rounder look, as we think it will contrast quite hilariously with the vegetable-on-vegetable violence that will be going on in the background (in the same way that little goose running around with a knife always makes us chuckle). 

We've started work on the artbible and checked out our options in Unity. We've hit a bit of a wall with our cel shader and we're now discussing possibly moving away from it entirely. Since we're not that experienced with Unity this part is going especially slow, but we're determined to make something work!

Particles in Unity seem stubborn in their determination to evade us. We've done some research into cartoon-looking stylized particles in Niagara in the meantime to get some sort of practice for when the Unity issue is fixed, and we got a decent-looking explosion.

Coding

Our programmers have put together a basic prototype of our core, tag-like mechanic and experimented with adding the ragdoll element to it so we can have something to begin messing around with.

Getting back into unity

First off I had to get back into unity, it had been a while so getting back in the groove of things was going to take some time before I started working on the prototype. I started with revisiting some older projects of mine to see how I did certain things and get used to the API again.

Soon after I started to look up stuff I hadn’t done before that was needed to make a unity prototype and later merge with the other developer in the team.

The first thing on the list was local multiplayer, to be able to test the later stages of the prototype I needed local multiplayer to work. Getting local multiplayer to work required me to put in multiple types of movement which is how I fell down the rabbit hole and started working on the movement for the first character. Getting the right-side joystick to work on the controller is something I was struggling with. I wanted to have either joystick move their own character I think the constraint there was that the same controller can’t be assigned to two separate characters. Therefore I implemented a keyboard movement method for the second player.

After completing the local multiplayer and setting up the player controls I dived into the game mode which for now looks more like a game of tag. When one player walks in to the other it tags the other player if the first one was it.

With this set up I needed to rig this game mode to explode, kind of, so I got started on building a timer that could be set and adjusted to make sure we had something to control the bomb exploding and later restart the timer or level too. Then I made sure to have it look for the player that  was tagged as the bomb carrier and have it there to with as we please which for now is telling the debug that that specific player has exploded. This would then later spawn the bomb already created by Bavo to have the player get blown up and ragdoll to space and beyond.

The ragdoll nightmare!

As Sander was getting back into unity I continued with my ragdoll experiments, however little did I know I would be hit by the little ghoul this week. When I recovered I could finally really start again, the first thing I wanted to do was get the animations working. This would be the base for the next few mechanics I would be making. I had figured out a system where I had a character performing the animation and then our ragdoll copying them, this would be achieved through copying the rotations of the arm and legs of the animation model and making them the target rotation of our ragdoll character. Here however I got stuck, it seemed no matter what I tried this would not work.

As you see my animations did not exactly work, and as I had already wasted a lot of time. So I moved on to making a "functional" punching mechanic which we could use for testing purposes. I achieved this by simply making a hitbox infront of the character which applies a force to whatever is inside it once the punch button has been pressed. This made me realize I had to find a way to switch between a full ragdoll and a ragdoll which is controllable.  Once I had this in place I could send my project to Sander so he could combine our efforts into a very first prototype. However we will be reworking our prototype from the ground up for a version which looks more at the very base mechanics of our game. 

Conclusion

this was not our week. But we are not gonna let this week hold us back, we will land back on our feet and recover from this set back.  Next week we should have a playable version which is actually fun!

Thank you for staying and reading through our silly adventures, we hope to see you next week for the next HOT POTATO update and all the wacky things we will experience along the way!