Update Environment:

Before we talk about the environmental details maybe a little explanation of what our idea is. When you combine ship and sci-fi a lot of times the game ends to be a space ship combat game. With the idea of an arena, we had quite a lot of possibilities we wanted to explore. Our first idea was to make an arena in space where the player(main ship) is blocked in an arena sphere full of obstacles and flying enemies. Wich at the beginning was great but we thought that it could be cooler to combine sci-fi elements with natural elements. We knew that combining those two would be a challenge but we wanted something unique and cool.  

Adding nature elements gives us new possibilities of mechanics. Like environmental obstacles, these are some we thought about:

- Desert: A sandstorm in the arena.
- Ice Desert: Ice stalactites falling in the arena.
- Volcanic wasteland: lava explosion or lava waterfall.
- Unkown planet: with acidic bubbles that come out of liquids of the ground.

We had more than that but these are the ones we were the most interested in. We finally decided to go with the desert because we had several cool ideas to add to it that would not be great in an ice cave or in an acid environment.

We already show this but this is what we imagined our level can be!

Now that we know in which environment our game is gonna be played the next task was to make assets for it. As you can see we made some assets ready to be used at our level. We made sure there is an big variety of different rocks. Some rock even have their own utility.

For example, the rocks with a hole in them will be used for pickups. The rocks that go from top to bottom will be used for a special trap we thought about which we’ll explain more next week. We made sure that those rocks are modular so that we can use them overall. The benefit is not only that we can use them overall but we can make more variety in our level for example we don’t have to use the rocks only on the ground but we can use it on the wall too or even the ceiling. For now, we are testing what would be the best layout for our level. We need to find a good balance. Too many obstacles can make the experience not enjoyable to play but not enough can take away the fun of it. We also already made some walls for watchers to stand on it because in every arena fight there are some people to watch! that's it for the parts of the assets now let's talk about the environment material.

What would a 3d game be without Materials! Material was for us an important aspect because everything object/assets needs to go well together. this is where our art style comes in place. We tried different technics and we finally found one we wanted for our assets. This is an example of what our rocks look like with the material we made.

We're happy about the progress of the environment and hope we can show you more about what the actual level looks like next week.

Update Enemies:

We already did one model for each kind of enemy. By following the art direction we wanted. We made for two enemies a full texture material. We also already rigged and skinned the Aerial enemy to make tests of how we can use the rig in unreal engine. After some tests, we discovered that we need to find a way to use or make controls in unreal engine to make custom animation because we can't export the controls or we have to find out how to. that's going to be something to look for next week. How to make custom controls for the skeleton of the aerial enemy? We'll need that to make its weapon move and make sure it aims automatically the player(main ship).

Here is an example of what the rigging of the aerial enemy is. like I said before we still have to know how we're going to use the controls in unreal engine but overall, this is what the movement will look like in the game.

Update Weapons:

We replaced our basic blockout with a new fresh missile mesh and texture. The texture follows the color sheme of the ship to match each other ofcourse. To finish of the missile we still need to make the particles, we hopely can let you see these to you next week.

Movement:

We added 2 movement modes, a standard and a more difficult movement mode. With the standard mode, you roll to the side and turn automatically when you push the joystick to the side. This is done by using both worldrotations and localrotations at the same time, and makes it easier for newer players to understand the controls and play the game. The other mode uses only local rotations, meaning that in order to turn quickly, you have to first rotate to the side by pushing the joystick to the side, and then pulling the plane up, by pushing the joystick down. This makes it harder for new players, but it gives you a lot more freedom, as you have a lot more freedom to move around in every direction.