Hello! It's the time again for a new devlog.

Combining Prototypes

This week has been an intensive one. A lot of work has been done and a bunch of progress has been made. As told in the previous week, we've focussed on adding not one, but multiple attractions with tasks. Besides that we have also focussed on getting a full playable demo ready by our next supervisor meeting. Here is an image of the current look of the map so far.

Attractions

The first task of the week was to put a focus on getting the attractions which would be connected to the task system and the breakdown system. This has been done, and in the current state of the project you can execute a task, be it repairing or sabotaging, directly influencing the attraction it is connected to and breaking it down or repairing it.

Pickups

The second thing to do was to get the trashcans and the trash working along with the task system. From now on the trash can be picked up, and thrown into a trashcan. However when the trashcan is full, the player will have to empty the trashcan in a randomly chosen drop-off point. Be sure to place the trashcan back on its place though!

AI

Thirdly the AI, the AI has been a part where a lot of work was necessary. But! We can proudly say it is getting in good shape. Even the current version of the AI has been added to the game. This means we now have NPC's!

Anger System

Including in the current AI e have an anger system. The NPC can get angry after having had a setback, in the current state, this is when waiting times are getting too long. The anger can of course go down again over time, but when an NPC reaches a certain anger limit, they will most likely leave the fair grounds.

Toilet System

Over time, the customers walking around the park will also feel the need to go to the toilet. Of course the fair has toilets, so that means they can go there. However, when the toilets are full, they will have to wait in line. But unfortunately, not everyone likes waiting in line for too long.
In the picture below, you can see the NPC's waiting in line to go to the toilet, but getting angry because the waiting time is getting too long.

Damage System

After adding all the necessary components for tasks and repairing/sabotaging, the damage system has been added as well. What does this mean? Well the staff get points for repairing the attractions, cleaning trash, putting everything nicely into place, and so on... With these points their progress slider will go up, and this slider will ultimately decide who wins the game! Beware though, the slider can also go downwards, and this can be done by the saboteur for sabotaging attractions, and leaving a mess of the island, or if the staff forget to put everything into their place. This slider is visualised in the bottom of the UI screen.

Dunk Tank

Finally the dunk-tank has been added as well. The dunk tank is the place where staff can timeout the person who they suspect of being an saboteur. This can be used to the advantage of the staff s they can repair more of the sabotage that the saboteur has caused, but this means the saboteur can also utilise this to his advantage, and timeout a staff member so keep sabotaging and have less people working on fixing his sabotages.

Result

Art Details

For this section, an example prop (a popcorn cart) has been made to place into the game. This cart is used to decide some more things regarding the art of the game.

Which Shading?

We started with deciding which kind of shading we liked most. The choice ultimately came down onto 4 examples

We chose for example 4, the last one of the row.

Ambient Occlusion

The question after that was whether we would use AO or not. In below image you can see an example with, and an example without AO respectively.

We Have chosen to include AO into out props as it look more pleasing to the eye because it accentuates the details in for example the wheels a little more. Combining the AO and the chosen shader we get the following result.

The map

While we have chosen to create an irregularly shaped map, we have also decided to create this using modular pieces. We did this because we think this will be much handier to create multiple maps in case we would work further on this in the future. It was also chosen for optimisation purposes, the other choice was to use vertex painting, using modular pieces will result in a lower polycount. Then lastly we also chose this because we can easily make the texture size the same as the asset itself, resulting in less memory usage for textures and so on.

Next week

Now that our art bible is done, and the mechanics have been figured out, we sill finally start with the first production sprint. This means we will start working on the tasks from the backlog and on the game assets, models, textures, implementing all features programming wise in the production Unreal project, and so on...

Thank you for reading this somewhat lengthy devlog and see you next week!