Good day!
We're a team of 5 students ( 2 developers, 3 artists) working as a team to deliver a polished product!
For this week, we've worked on a prototyping our game after having done some research.
After a group meeting trying to clear any discrepancies or misconceptions of our development we've made the choice to 
prototype a Dodgeball like game where the ball goes around like crazy and you're supposed to SMASH it into each other.

SAFETY FIRST!
Before driving off you make sure to wear seatbelts, so we've made sure to use Version Control!
Perforce will be our saviour during these trying times to ensure mostly 0 conflicts!

------- The Developers Dance -------
The programmers have worked on getting prototypes ready in both Unreal and Unity! 
For the Unreal side of the development we've worked on getting the general flow up and going!

2 Player Tussle
After a butt-load of issues we've ended up with a working prototype that has fought these issues and prevailed! For the most part that is, Unreal local multiplayer has proven to be more difficult than we've anticipated!
We'll be looking into this issue as we weren't really able to test it because our developers didn't have access to 2 controllers at the same time. 

Physics Phyiesta
Making a ball that would bounce off surfaces infinitely and getting more and more velocity is the perfect dream for our idea. 
Our own so little particle accelerator :)
Which would be feasible in a perfect world. Sadly, we've gotten most of the physics up and running but our ball still loses some momentum after bouncing; the restitution has been set 1 and friction to 0 ( using UE's built in projectile component) which should result in no velocity loss) but it seems we're missing something or misunderstanding something ( true shocker right). 
Our walls have been granted a bouncy physics material to ensure our ball of doom keeps wreaking havoc.
Making our own little physics world has also been a suggestion of our brainstorm so we might actually resort to that, as it would grant us more the power of being OVERLORD ( aka more control over the logic and a better understanding as Unreal's physics does get a bit Phyunky).

Our miro board has become more polished, ready for the deluge of reference and inspo that is sure to follow. Some reference has been collected, but a discussion were all of us present our inspo and  come to a consensus will be imminent.

Shader shenanigans

After doing dedicated research and fiddling around with all kinds of ideas, a couple of shader concepts have come rolling out;

First up: A sobel filter in UE5. This ingenious piece of programming detects edges through a matrix and makes them black. Everything else is white. White? As in the color that disappears when used as a multiply? Yes absolutely! This means we can use this to create black outlines around everything in quite a stylish way!

 Second: A simple way to make similar black outlines in Unity. By duplicating the model and inverting the normals, we can easily create the illusion that there is a black line around the object. (For some reason Unreal had some unreal problems with it. Unity managed though) 

Last but not least: pixel style! Another cool idea was to make everything have a pixel art style, even though it's 3D.  So far we achieved a wonderful result, but the true test for this filter will be to see how it responds to movement. 

It could be interesting to combine the outline and the pixel art for a really strong unique style. If this will be successful is yet to be seen, but we hope that you are looking forward to this experiment as much as us!

See you next week for our upcoming update on the project!
-Team Boomers