Hi everyone! Another week of frenzyin' with footies and we're once again here to share it with you.This weeks menu includes ability prototyping and even more art documentation, aswell as tweaking what we had before!

Programming:

Hey guys, its the programmers here to talk about the core updates from our side! As mentioned before the main dish this week is *drumroll*

Species Abilities!

The core idea behind abilities is to give each side some more identity, mobility and fun! This means that both teams should be able to use their abilities in creative ways to both attack and defend, and make each team more fun to pilot!

Penguins:

The penguins have mastered their frosty element and are able to summon forth walls of ice!

The icy wall will stand for a few seconds to provide an extra barrier of defence, a step up to greater heights, or to annoy an enemy defender!Furthermore the penguins have been able to combine this with their lobbing technique to create a piller from underneath themselves and shoot themselves forward! Who said penguins cant fly?

Core challenges and goals for penguin ability:
Among the many ideas we had we chose to implement the ice wall spawning as the team ability for Penguins.
The main difficulty with implementing this is the shooting of the penguin when holding the lob modifier.

Not only does the pillar need to spawn properly under the penguin facing the right side, it also needs to move the penguin to the top of it and shoot it. Currently this is done by adding the delta between pillartop and penguin location to the penguin and adding a set force in the direction of the pillars rotation.

A cool stretch goal could be a dynamically spawned pillar that goes to your current height and then shoots you even further from there, instead of having a static height where the penguin moves to. Aliens: So many possibilities for aliens... Blasters, portals, alien lifeforms. Tons of different options that have both offensive and defensive opportunities, but eventually we chose for their iconic vehicle: The UFO.

Aliens:

So many possibilities for aliens... Blasters, portals, alien lifeforms.
Tons of different options that have both offensive and defensive opportunities, but eventually we chose for their iconic vehicle: The UFO.

mounting their U(nidentified) F(ooty) O(bject), they can use it for a number of benefits:

- Move at high speeds
- Bump faster, harder and alien-er
- Hold the lob modifier to fly upwards.

Core challenges and goals for alien ability:

The main issues coming up with the ship are 1. jetpack/flying mechanic and 2. mesh (de)activation.
1. was mainly solved by checking if the upwards velocity does not exceed a maximum, and then adding the force to it.
This did add the feature of overruling speed, where we were originally thinking about smoothly going upwards. It does however feel better and more controllable, lowering the skill floor of using this ability better. Which we think is good.

The Map:

Some extras about the map to mention is giving some more personality and colourisation to the placeholder shapes, and trying out some new slice layouts!

ART STUFF:

Today is the week when can we say (mostly) goodbye to boring documentation and actually start doing stuff!

However, this doesn't mean nothing interesting turned out to be there :3
After actually trying to design characters, we ended up with retarded dragon from space and psychopatic penguin. Look at them, they're so cute, They are so squishy and chaotic gremlins and remember, they're still playing soccer.

There are some other gremlins that didn't make it. RIP, they will stays in our hearts as long as I will remember (not so long) [*]

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We also thought about other stuff than derpy egg creatures like how their territory gonna look like or what skills they are gonna have. (More on skills in programmers section) The game is gonna be so colourful and lively !

After we will actually got green lighted and start production there will be so much more from artist side to tell, for now it is what it is.

Whats Next?

Next week the first sprint begins! This means setting our first sprinting footsteps (badum tss) into the final project.  We'll take what we've learned to the new project and adjust some thinks we've learned. 

My (Seppe) personal most exciting part is turning all the remaining blueprints into cpp classes.   Working on the prototype has taught me a ton about structure, and despite blueprinting being faster for testing due to experience, now the full implementation can begin!

See you next week!
Stay tuned and see you soon! <3