Hi there!

It's us again, the Fare Exchange development team. 

A new week but also a whole new sprint! New items to tackle on the agenda, new cool things to show you guys!

Art

Remember last week's engine designs? Well this week we got started on that immediately!

The base of our "engine", or shall I say our "eternal flame" powering the boat, has been modelled.

A flickering mystical fire special effect was also made.  A version was created for on top of the bowl:

And also a particle that we are going to use as asset for our fuel pickup. (We don't currently have a carrying animation yet so for now it's a bit awkwardly attached to one of the characters hands. Whoops.)

Speaking of particles, this week was special effects galore for one of our artists. All bases of the effects that we are going to add, either for player feedback or to convey the visuals of certain assets, have been created. They just need some better visualising.

We may or may not show some next week ;)

OOP! We also finished the hair on all of our separate character models! They are attached to a hair socket on the base mesh so they can easily be swapped in the blueprint of our player character. Definitely something we will try to implement in the next week.  Then you'll actually be able to easily see who you are actually controlling. :P

Programming

Finally, our first enemy is in the testing phase! The behaviour tree, damage and movement speed need some fine tuning but that will happen. All in due time, slowly over the course of the next few weeks. 

Our player character is also in it's final stage, all animations and behaviour trees are done. Maybe a bit fine-tuning to add as the cherry on top.

And yes!! Every player has a different character! (So your bad gamer friend can't say that it was your fault of losing)

There is also a functional game loop (where you can win! woohoo!) and not only lose like before. ;)

Sound

Our sound designer jumped right into the code and animations, and implemented and spatialized our sounds:

• There is a nice splash sound when you jump into the magic water.
• And a funny cartoonish dizzy sound when a player gets stunned.
• Since they are small demigods, when they jump we hear how they use their cute strength.
• Some cartoony whooshes for the attack with our future cool weapon, an OAR!
• Complemented the rfx of our artists when a fuel task appear, as a small flame.

We also implemented some non-diegetic sounds for the environment like some synthesized cymbal swells to add some tension(we are planning to add more elements to this feature) to give some funny chills to our players!, and complement the off-screen lore.

Side note

I know we always show a lot of images of the stuff that our artists make, but our programmers and sound designer really do work really hard as well. It's just more difficult to show that stuff to you guys visually without just showing you just a straight up picture of code or an audio file. Next week I'll try to record a video of a playthrough so you guys can see and hear the work that's been going on behind the scenes for now.

What's next?

Next week we will get our animations in order, give our characters some cool weapons and refine our particle effects. After that the artists will tackle the UI, the programmers will fix any remaining functionality that needs to be added and our sound designer will add the last needed sounds; before we go into our last week (we're almost there already?!) which will purely be a polishing and fixing phase.

Until next week! 

The Fare Exchange Team