Devlog 04: Production Starts!

Hello Again

How's it been? With us it's been going well! We have officialy started development! 

No more messy code, no more placeholder throwaway art (except if its a proper blockout ;) ), only real professional work from now on!
All 6 of us have worked hard to get things going. We did a lot of boring stuff at first, further working in our hacknplan, having a meeting on who will do what, and just planning out how our next 3 weeks look like. 

The planning part is of course also super important but not that interesting, so let's dive into what else we did!

Final Level Blockout

We did have a test level beforehand, but that wasn't going to cut it.
A good level blockout should have (at least some) design behind it (both art and programming wise). And above that proper naming conventions, measurements, placing,...

How the previous level was one big mess to chance things and see what's actually going on, this on is way more clear and workable! It took a bit longer to set up but will be faster to work with going forward!

(Quick) concepts

As you might have noticed, the level blockout design was color coded!
Even though time is short, we sketched out our most important assets already and chose where we will (roughly) put them! This is to make sure we make sure we reuse our assets properly and don't spend too much time on details or assets we dont actually need!

Again a case of putting some effort in upfront but hoping it will pay back in the long run!

Animations

We added some animations on our temporary meshes too already! Our programmers wanted to implement them from the start already, so us artists listened ;)

We had some hickups but we learned a lot about the UE5 animation system and frame along the way! 

Characters WIP!

And a sneak peak of the player and enemy blockout!

Rebuilding the basics:

The programmers had a lot of work to do, we can't reuse any prototyping code, since the focus was on function instead of cleanliness right now!

We remade the movement, we are starting to remake the picking up of objects and camera and we rebuilded the AI system so we can start from a clean state for everything!

Even though its not really visible (damn you 3MB file limit) switching animation states are also implemented for the AI! As well for deepened behaviour systems (f.e. looking at the player like its shown right now)

See you next week!

We are all pretty excited for the future! Not only the project is coming together but our teamwork is starting to take shape too! It's kind off crazy how fast people can adapt to form a team, and have it work out!

Question for our fellow students: How are you all feeling? Excited just like us or something else?
And for the other people reading this: Take a look at the other games from Game Projects 2025! We've been reading some devlogs ourselves and there are such fun ideas out there!

ciao! -Bo, Indy, Mireau, Mia, Helga, Warre