Hello!

We are now officially 2 weeks in our development of our game!

We've fixed a few things from last week (e.g. local multiplayer in unreal) and decided to add a new mechanic to our game as well!

No Man Left Behind
Last week we've had a problem that we couldn't get the local multiplayer to work in our Unreal version of our prototype.
We're glad to update that we've been able to fix the issue!

Event Trifecta!
After our meeting with our supervisors last week, we've come to the decision to implement a new mechanic!
The "Events" mechanic.
The purpose of these events is to suddenly change the flow of the game and a bit of randomness to it as well.
Currently we're at 3 different Events; The Ice floor event, The pillars event and the Lightning event!
The way these events get dispatched is after a certain time has passed, a random one gets selected and the logic follows.

Caution, Slippery! (Ice Floor)
Once the ice floor event gets dispatched, the players movement component parameters get changed.
There's less braking and less friction causing the player to slide over the floor!

Rising Boulders! (Pillar)
After this event gets dispatched, Pillars from the floor start rising(animation yet to be implemented)
Right now a set amount of pillars spawn which causes the ball to bounce around.

Supercharge! (Lightning)
This event consists of 2 main parts, the lightning puddle and the lightning box. The lightning box is just a bounding box which can spawn a random amount of lighting puddles in the area of the bounding box.
If the player overlaps with the lightning puddle, the player gets Supercharged!
Supercharged players are faster and stronger. They zoom around the place and smash the ball with more oomph.

Look at that!
For the visual aspect of the game, we have begun researching and experimenting with the rendering of our game. There are numerous aspects we need to consider and experiment with regarding this topic. For example, we delved into the meanings and distinctions between forward rendering and deferred rendering. Additionally, we examined our render pipeline to pinpoint steps that could be excluded or optimized for enhanced efficiency in the future.

Art development
Finally the  Art Bible begins to take form! We have been figuring out what style we are going for and now finally got to sketching, selecting colors and other good stuff. The first character design idea has taken shape, since we needed something to test our colors on! 

Furthermore, the first asset has been pushed through the entire pipeline to stresstest our methods. With this knowledge under our belt, we can start pumping out an art torrent! This also brings sad news, however. The sobel filter detects inside edges as well, and everything becomes way too noisy with the outlines. This means we will have to search for a new way to add the cartoony outline style to our game. We are up to the challenge!

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