Greetings and salutations!

Last week went well. We had a working prototype and had our classmates do some testing and there was a lot of positive feedback. At it's core, even in a janky, prototype stage, our game is fun! We do need to iron out some kinks now that we've officially started production but we're confident it'll go well. 

Alina is also back in the game more or less and we're excited to have 'em working with us again!

ART

We iterrated on our level blockout so we could get a list of props to fill up our environment with and hopefully fixed some of the spots people kept getting stuck in. Of course, stuff might still change if we decide something else would work better in the end but it is a good starting point!

Secondly, since it is a main part of the look of our game we tackled Unity's shader graph and figured out an outline post processing effect! We're mostly new to Unity so it went a bit slow but we have something that works and we're now more familiar with the software. Overall, massive win. We now have a working outline with adjustable parameters that we can tweak for varried results.

Thinner outline:

Thicc:

Last but not least, we started working on our cute little vegetable characters by blocking out shapes and trying to find a versatile base. This is particularly important, as the ragdoll system requires the characters to be quite similar to each other, yet they still have to convey the shape of their respective vegetable!

Code

This week movement was on schedule. There were a couple things related to that though. We were told to look into a new input system that unity offers as a package since we had struggled with the native system to make the prototype work. and so i got to work exploring.
There were a couple things i had to keep in mind, this was basically research. First of all does it solve the issue we were having in the prototype which was mainly which player had what controller. Secondly does it bring any new issues we need to be aware of or maybe there are even deal breakers.

Researching the issue it was meant to solve went well The coordinators were right to suggest the new system for this it seems to be where this system really shines! Players are linked to a device and players can join the game by pressing a button on said device. This already fixes the issue of knowing which controller is which player and it gives us more control over it too. This was all supported in the system and no real coding workaround was needed at al, very impressive stuff.

Next up was making sure this new system was future proof for us to use, figuring out if menu navigation, menu control and actually setting up the controls was not gonna give us more issues than the native system in the long run. 
First up was setting up the controls, this was a breeze! The new input system provides a much more structured and clear view of all your different controls and can even detect what type of controller so you can display controls for every type of controller if there is a difference between them.

After that there came menu navigation. The new input just keeps impressing us. Menu navigation is already implemented in a default control scheme by the new input system. We can tweak it to make it your own and that should take considerably less time than having to code that in separately the way we'd have to with the native input system. For the pause menu the player remained uncontrollable during the pause but the menu was usable. It switches between the two sets of controls quite well. 

Lastly there was controlling which player(s) can navigate a menu. Sadly due to this weeks time constraints we didn't get too test this manually but from what we've looked up it's a bit of a hassle if you want it to be player specific. Luckily for our game hat really isn't set in stone and since it's a local multiplayer game we feel that the difference is neglectable as you're all next to each other and messing with each other's menu's might actually indirectly be some fun amongst friends.

After all the research was done I got to implementing the movement in to the main project. That included running around, jumping and rotating to face forward when running. As we've all seen before it's not impressive to watch it in action. Plus you've seen it in last week's prototype already, if not I encourage you to go play it :) . I solved some issues we experienced back in the prototype though, for example how you can't slide along walls. It actually had to do with the standard friction on surfaces that unity uses and not the drag set on the player character.

That's all for this week, thank you so much for reading through all of it. We're happy that all of you are interested inn the development of the game. Next week we'll have more news to share, see you then!