Artistic Part

Enemies Update:

Barrier Trap:

Last week we talked about the new trap and I'm finally ready to show you how it looks like and how I designed it. I also make some design changes and came back on some decisions I made last week.

First, let's talk about the restriction I had to make the design and also about the difficulty I had with some design choices I made. the first problem was the size of the trap I had to make it small enough to put it correctly on the rocks. Making it too big would make it unusable for some rocks.

Like all design should be made I started with some simple sketches to get the idea of the shape and because we already have a shape language of the enemies I know where I can get my inspiration to make it.

This already gives me a good idea of what I have to model and because a drawing doesn't always give a good representation of how an object will look in 3d space the best way to test that out is by making a blockout. The two first designs were the ones I wanted to develop a little bit more. the reason why I choose them is because they were the one that goes better with the other enemies type. After I made the blockouts we couldn't choose the one we wanted to use. I simply made a finished version of them both. We think that the two would be good to use but we have to make and choice and the first one looks to be the one we were the most interested in. probably because of its very aggressive look sharp and very industrial. here is where we thought the second problem would be. The first concept has these antennas or ears(We don't know how to call them). Those ears make it difficult to place them on the rocks without making them disappear in the rock. We already tested it and if we play with the rotation it can work without problem.

Here You can see the final mesh with the textures and the force field. As you can see we made some design changes to the force field. We told last weak that the force field would be blue because the green was a bit too distracting but after some time looking at it it looks good and it seems more logical to distract the player to be more visible.

Hatch:

You probably have already seen the blockout of the hatch. I made a final version for it with a new shine and look based on the blockout. Like the Barrier trap, we change the force field in green. Hopefully, by using the same color scheme and shape language on all our enemies it gives the feeling that they are a group of enemies.

That's it for the enemies! we're happy with what we made so far for the enemies and we will work hard to show you more in the coming weeks.

Environment Update:

Plants:

Yes you heard it correct we finally added plants to the environment. Ofcourse they needed to fit in the warm desert climate to fit with the rest of the scene. So to achieve the cohesive feeling we needed to look at some reference of some real life plants that would grow in this climate. And since they would grow in the shadows of the arena and would light up the dark parts we needed to add our own touch to the plants. We decided to add some stems with a glowing boll growing out of it.

Here you can see the arena before we added the plants. 

And here with the plants, we still need to add the light to the plants. But we mostly focused on the placement of the plants since they mostly grow in the shadow. So there couldn't be plants in the middle part where all the light hits on the floor. And we also focused on the size, we will probally add some more small plants in the arena to fill it more up. 

Pickup Update:

SpeedBoost pickup:

The mesh for our speedboost is here.  When you fly tough this pickup you will have a speedboost. Be ware this is only untill you run out of it.  As you get hunted by the enemies in the arena a speedboost can be very usefull. So make sure you keep looking for them to refill your boost.  For the scheme we wanted to go for the same one as we have for our character. This way you see clearly that this will help you in your way towards victory. 

Weapon Update:

Lazer:

When you are going trough the round, you will get a ship upgrade by a pickup. With this upgrade your weapons deal more and more damage. Your first upgrade will give you the ability to shoot twice as much energy bolts. And every second time you upgrade your ship you will get a new color for your lazers. Making them stronger than the previous one. This keeps on repeating untill you have all your upgrades. 

These are some off the colors we had in thought for the lazers from weak to powerfull.  

Technical Part

Homing missiles:

For the homing missiles, we first tried using rotations, But this gave some weird problems with missiles getting gimball locked and sometimes just rotating at very high speeds while flying around randomly. Then we tried to use unreal's projectile movement component, but setting the target wouldn't work properly, and the missile didn't behave the way we wanted it to. Eventually we tried using a velocity vector and currentSpeed variable, setting the forward of the missile to the velocity vector, and moving the missile in through the world according to the velocity vector and the currentSpeed. To make the missile homing, we just interpolated the velocity vector at a constant speed towards the target vector.

By pressing Y on the controller, you set the closest visible enemy as the homing target. This is done by getting a list of all the enemies, transforming their positions to the screen space, and then checking if it is in the viewport and comparing the distances from the viewport.

Everything about enemies:

All of the enemies are almost completed, only a small issue that needs to be fixed and they'll be ready to get destroyed... or destroy, that's up to you!

As showed in the previous devlog, the hatch worked absolutely fine, and now with updated meshes it looks better too!

The mine has become more powerfull. It now doesn't care if you fly right above it, or a mile above it. It will detect you anyways, so stay alert gladiator!

Both the aerial and turret enemies detect you. Whilst they sure fire bullets in your direction, they wont look at you. The aerial enemy does fly towards you when you are detected, and will wander around when you are not.

These problems will be fixed when the next devlog hits, so make sure you are ready to kill some enemies by then!

Allright, that's all for this one! See you on the battlefield, gladiator!