Devlog 9 April 2021 - Week 3

McKenna

This week, I created the website for Ignis (hello world!) and designed the layout. I also researched dialogue mechanics in Unreal.

Ryan

This week, I did some experiments in a third-person project to determine the types of lighting we might want to use. Most of the lighting used in our game (braziers, player) will be point lights. For ambient lighting, a dim sky light without shadow casting could provide enough light for the player to make out the basics of the environment. If we want to, we could increase the intensity of this sky light when the player uses their fire magic.

Geoff

This week, I got a lot of MIDI Instruments from Native Instruments and Reaper in order to work on our soundtrack. While we haven't quite nailed down what our overall soundscape will look like, we are looking at songs from games like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's Divine Beast Vah Ruta (Inside) and Celeste's Heart of the Mountain as inspiration for our music.

Danny

I began prototyping the breakable ice blocks in unreal. I took it upon myself to learn blueprints to do this task. I am familiar with C++ and upon researching around, acquired the impression that the Unreal Engine's functionality and paradigms are more naturally taught through blueprints. At the end, I ended with a blueprint that could break on a collision with a fireball, which respawned after a set amount of time, and waited for the player to not be overlapping it.

Jasmine

I started working on the player character model this week! The base mesh is completed and retopologized, so our other team members can work on rigging while I complete the full model. The hair and clothes are still just in their basic blocking stage right now, so more details will be added next week in addition to textures.

Sophia

This week I worked on some grey box assets and begun early work on the base rig we'll be using for most of the characters in the game. Since Terry took care of most of the main platforms assets for out environment I took care of a lot of the decorative pieces like shelves, books, potion flasks, etc. Since the rigging and animation process can easily start to pile up I got to work on a basic body rig that should fit a majority of the characters in our game. I used a script to create curve controllers that are aligned to the selected joints in order to save some time. Now I'm working on adding the IKFK arm switch so that I can pass this off to Terry to check and animate with. The legs will be fully IK for the time being.

Terry

This week, I mainly worked on setting up the entire Unreal greybox environment and a couple of greybox items on a larger scale. Along with Danny, I've ultimately decided on a proper design that fit the game's narrative and flow as players progress. I also experimented with a bit of the lighting in the game to set the environmental mood that we are looking for. Finally, I've started to learn about particle systems to prepare adding them in the future (an example being the local volumetric fog in certain areas of the map).