Dev (Michael):

This week was the week we needed to perfect our prototype. We were fortunate enough to have finished off last week with a decently working prototype, so we even managed to do some playtesting. This also meant that we had some time left over, which was nice as we still needed to finish the tech document and of course work for our other courses. 

This week was also the week we had to zero in on which engine we would be using for the next few weeks for our production phase. This proved to be no easy decision, but we eventually managed to choose. We will be using Unreal Engine 4, just like our prototype.

The case for Unity was made after Jonas prototyped a quick build in it. This went quicker than expected, and definitely quicker than the prototype we made in Unreal. However, saying we would be more efficient would be misleading, as Jonas had a good amount of prior experience in Unity, and neither of us did in Unreal. This explains our initial lack of speed for the first couple of features, but as evidenced by our hacknplan, our efficiency has increased drastically with our proficiency in BP. 

Another point we considered is the fact that the artists have no familiarity to Unity at all. They would have to learn everything from scratch, which would be a time sink. Even though it's more important that we as programmers know our way around the engine and implementing features with it, we felt that any small amount of time we might save by switching to Unity would be lost to teaching the artists how to use it.

Overall I'm very happy with what we've achieved so far and the way we've picked up developing in Unreal, and I'm very excited to see what we can accomplish over the next few weeks of production.

Art (Gilles):

This week we decided to go for hand painted textures.

Nothing pbr involved due to time limitations.

The asset list is pretty long, stretching from models to textures and particle systems.

We'll be adding in game events such as a bridge that can be destroyed, which give them a different mesh and texture.

Environmental changes have also been made. Up untill this point we only had a long stretch of land.

We'll be adding a bridge as mentioned, but also an ice cave and end point where events can happen to keep the gameplay interesting.

More to come!