Hey everyone! Daphné back for another update! (it's been a while, I know)

We're in the middle of our second production sprint this week and the game is really nearing it's final form. The team spent time music, UI art and UI programming and a little more modelling work for things we need for the final few animations in our game. Let's have a look!

Art:

Alex spent most of their time this week drawing everything we'd need for our UI screens. They worked on visuals for the player connection screen, which shows which players are connected and which aren't and also what input method they use. In case you forgot that you have a controller in your hands. They also started work on drawing and animating visual warnings for when waves are about to some from a certain direction. 

They also spent some time on drawing the fishes used to display player scores on but those aren't implemented yet.

Beau spent this week on learning to work with Unity's particle system. He experimented with different methods of implementing a rain effect to show during our whirlpool round. He also worked on selections visuals, for which he needed to make a new shader & texture for the fisherman. He also made some particles for the selection and an arrow & player head visual to show which player is which character. After that he worked on the animation of our waves.

Stijn worked mostly on particle effects for player feedback. He made a dust trail  and speed lines which follow the player and shows their movement nicely. He also worked on a particle effect to show the safe zone around the player which is holding an eel fish. After that he modelled a buoy which we'll use as for our player death animation. In the beginning of the week he also spent time on fixing up our player animations. Here's some of his work!

Programming:

Miguel spent most of the week composing music for our game. He's still somewhat new at this so it took a while but the current version we have in the game fits quite nicely with the vibe of our game. In Miguel's own words "I ended up making a somewhat "coconutty" track, carried by bongo-based percussion and a marimba melody, and backed by a mix of nautical background noise.". Once the track was done he implemented it into the game, making it play during the whole match until the victory screen, pitching the volume down between rounds. After this he spent some time composing 2 sound effects for when fishes are close to activating their effect and implemented them. To finish off the week he added the wave warning visuals created by Alex to the project.

Then lastly, myself. I started off this week fixing a couple issues with our animations, we were using a model which had no bones in our player prefab which prevented the animator from doing anything but it was kind enough to not tell us this. Then I did some bug hunting & fixing since a lot of my tasks were waiting on other people's work. Later in the week when this was done I got to work making the controls screen. 

After that I tackled my biggest task of this week, the player connection screen. I first spent some time thinking how to properly make players and allow them to give input in one scene (the connection screen scene) and then transferring them to the game scene and having them work nicely there. After that I spent some time fixing a few bugs which occur when players joined the game from the connection screen. 

To finish off my week I implemented a simple pause screen in the game and made the animated ice cube on the start screen work nicely with controller and keyboard.

That's all for this week! I hope you enjoyed reading and are excited to try out our game when it's done soon!

- Daphné