Week 2, and cattidtude is comming along. 

Progress on Prototype 

I begun the prototype by making a character that we can move around and push things around with. At the beginning this was using a placeholder mesh since the right mesh wasn't finished yet. 

After this i made some interactables with which the player can interact. I made one that can be pushed around by the player without any effort to simulate smaller objects.

 For the bigger objects the player has to interact with it.

We added an example layout for a level without any props in it to test things. When the cat model was done that model was added.

Progress Artist

This week the artists Finished the art bible, made some first renders and tested features in the art Prototype. They made Cat animations, UI elements, particle FX's and made a temporary level lay-out. By doing so they cleared a lot of elements that we thought would be the most challenging to get to work. 

(written by Pjotr)

UI/HUD

Glenn made UI/HUD sketches and blockouts, to get a feeling of what they would look like, what they would display and what kind of rules they would follow. For example what color palette do they use, what shapes should the buttons have,... . During this week we tackled the Title screen, Main menu, the character select menu, the end of a round screen, the pause screen and the in game HUD.

Main menu

Pause screen

Stamina Element

Designwise we planned to attatch the stamina bar directly to the corresponding player but we were not really sure yet how to do that. So the research for that began. 

Concept:

Glenn tested how to attatch the Ui on a standard third person character and implemented a stamina variable that drains while pushing.

Cat animation

Already during the brainstorm phase of our project this issue popped up and it left us feeling unsettled: If we want to have playable cats - we need to make playable cats.But why is that an issue?
For human characters there are easy options like mixamo animations and autorigging systems,  but for cat characters (or honestly every other friend with 4 legs) this is a whole different story. We spend the last weeks wondering: "What if we can´t get the cats to work?". Not being in the clear about such an essential paart of our game was scary so I dedicated my research this week to cat animations. 

Honestly, the beginnging was not really easy. None of us had proper animations skills so it was a lot of new information to take in.
I started by creating a basic cat model we could use to test out the yet to be decided rigging pipeline. So far so good.

The most important was to figure out which programm to use. Maya is probably number one when it comes to animation but since I am not very used to the programm I had some trouble. In my research I found out about CAT rigging in 3dsMax, so I tried out working with that and it worked better for me.

I managed to rig and skin the model and made a first walking animation to get used to animating.

I tested if everything works fine in unreal and then continued to make a running animation: 

And a push animation:

When I had all the animations done I exportet everything to a test level in unreal engine and set up the animation blueprint. 

Glenn added the Stamina Element to it and I made a quick vase object then can be pushed and break to give it a feel on how the game would be like.

(written by Sarah)

FX

I started on the base emitters for the game. There's  two types that will be used.

• basic emitters(with a singular particle to display highlighted objects)
• bursts for when the cat jumps or lands.

From the start, we knew we didn't want them to look realistic, so we went for a stylised look.

For now it uses very basic materials which will change over the course of development

Models

• Props

As for props, they are made out of very basic shapes with some added roundness to the sides to give a slightly stylistic and friendlier feel to them.

We didn't want to go overboard on texturing and unique unwraps so they're textured by just using base colors, layed out on a texture atlas.

This gives us an easier time to quickly concept and work out color blockouts without spending too much time on it.

We thought of using gradients on the textures aswell but after thinking for a bit, we decided to make use of the lighting in the level to give them gradients.