Hello Everyone!

Much like we mentioned last week, we have now been cleared for production! This means that the whole team has been very busy restructuring our messy prototype assets and redoing the project from scratch!

Programming

The start of the production week also meant a “fresh” start. We looked at what we learned in the prototype weeks, put it on the side and started with a fresh editor. The prototype code was sometimes messy. We cant lie about that, but that is prototyping, this is for real now so good coding it is.

Good coding also means that it takes longer to make some things so we aren’t on the same gameplay level as previous week, but give us some time and the result will be much better.

Of course we already worked a lot this week, this is what we achieved…

You can already connect with up to 4 players, WITH VISUALS, yeah that's right, PLAYER FEEDBACK. And what can everyone do well, we also have already made a cursor that can move on the screen and that can pick up blocks, sometimes. There is also a turn system so you’ll already have to wait your turn before you can play, isn't that fun. Camera movement is also already there with the ability to move up, down, left and right so all the movement you want in a game like this.

A lot of time also went to some backend things, can’t really show you guys that, unless code is what you want so see here? Even tho we can’t really show it, the backend took probably the most time this week, so just believe me when I say we did a lot of programming this week.

Art

For the art team, being cleared for production removed a massive blocker, and we expect to barrel straight into developing a clean and visually interesting world!

Main Shader port

A massive part of the project’s foundation lies in the main shader setup. It is here that the visual charm of the game should lie, or at least build off of. We wrote the toon shader from the bottom up, this time a lot cleaner, annotated and no spaghetti anywhere (we swear). Given that it's finally ported and we can start assembling pieces here and there, we could finally construct an early insight into a coherent environment all running off this pixelated artstyle:

Noise textures

As mentioned earlier, a big worry in the team is that the artstyle will become too monotonous and bland, so we are doing everything possible to amp up the depth of the artstyle, while keeping the scope realistic. This mainly comes in the turn of tiling noise textures, that we triplanar project over our assets with a softlight blend, to introduce color variation:

Ice shader

Also; since our game is going to feature powerups, we want to supply art that will support the intuitive understanding of what is happening at any given time, we never want to leave the player confused. This means that for the powerup that makes the next block slippery, we’ve decided to rely on the intuitive understanding that ice is slippery, and write a shader that will make a block look like ice. Here it is in use!!

Writing this ice shader took significantly longer than expected. A key issue was the vertex displacement that happens all over the block to give it a bumpy, extra layer of ice-coated feel. Since our texturing pipeline makes us unwrap all points at the same exact uv location, getting the point locations in relation to each other was a mess, since they all would read as being in the same spot. This meant that when applying an offset, they would all move the same. This was solved by making a second uv set for every block, solely to be used for the vertex displacement. The unwrap in question is nothing particularly demanding, simply a projection unwrap. Here is an example displaying how the ice accidentally came out really smooth, which wasn’t intended:

Environment art

Here is a preview of how the environment can look from the front view and the side views

Our next blogpost will be in a couple of weeks due to our schedule, but we will continue to work on the various programming and art tasks in the meantime. 
See you then!