Hey ALEXA! Google the latest BOOMERS devlog! WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND ALEXA CALL GRANDSON TIMMY TO EXPLAIN. NO DON'T SET REMINDER. 

Introduction

This week, we focused on creating some more assets, creating some first level designs and implementing some animations and FX. From this point forward, we can finally see the game taking form. With our first assets placed in the level, combined with all the mechanics made by our development team, we inch closer and closer to a playable product.
There is still a lot work to be done, especially the combining of the assets of the art team with the code of the dev team, but we finally are making some real progress to a satisfactory end result.
The questions we asked ourselves this week were:

• What map size suits our game best?
• Will we be able to finish all our tasks of this sprint, and if not, which ones will be transferred to the next sprint?
• What were the issues we had last week and how will we change our plans to avoid these in the future?
• Will we keep working with URP or do we switch to the Built-In render pipeline?

Art

This last week, we mainly continued working on asset creation just like last week. We made some extra building models, made some adjustments to the character model, made sure all assets were logically sized compared to each other, etc.
Because we are getting pretty close to finishing all our core assets, we also were able to already make some models and animations for the power ups.

A significant amount of time this week was spent on blocking out levels and already making some first iterations of the first level.

A new thing we also tried this week was the shuriken particle system. Most of us only have experience with making FX in Niagara, so adapting to this new workflow slowed down work for a decent amount of time.

Lastly, we also made some first designs of how the UI is gonna look.

Technical Art

As mentioned before, last week we found out the limitations of Unity's URP and noticed the lack of features of the new post processing stack. The main issue was the absence of the ambient occlusion effect. We've taken a look at possible solutions like implementing a custom post processing effect into the new post processing stack, but this proved to be too advanced for our current knowledge of Unity and its render pipelines.
In the end, we opted for switching back to the Built-In render pipeline. This way we could take advantage of the older post processing v2 stack, which does support the ambient occlusion effect. However, this also meant we could not work with the shadergraph pipeline anymore. This meant that very complex custom shaders are out of the window, as nobody has a lot of experience with ShaderLab or HLSL.
Because of this, we lost quite some time remaking our current shaders in ShaderLab.

Switching to the Built-In render pipeline also means we will not be able to use the new gpu particle system and will have to fall back to the older shuriken particle system.

Programming

This week was the final week we worked purely on the underlying systems. From next week on we'll build the actual game on these underlying system!

We finally implemented the bomb passing over mechanic. You're now able to pass over the bomb from 1 player to the other player. The player who receives the bomb will get thrown in the air and stunned for some time.

Bomb exploding work

If the bomb timer ends, the players with the bomb will explode and get teleported to the dead locations. If there are more than 2 players, the bomb will get assigned to a random living player until there is only 1 player left. Also the round system works, if there is only 1 player left a new round will start (if there are multiple rounds set).

The spawning of the power up 

It's very easy for us to make new spawn locations. It's just a matter of creating an empty GameObject and assigning it to the arena as a power up spawn location. The spawning of the power ups depends on 2 variables (a min and max amount of time until it spawns). They'll spawn somewhere randomly between these 2 times and on a random power up spawn location.

Picking up of a power up

Currently we only have 1 debug power up to test the system,  which prints something out to the console. We've set up 2 types of picking up a power up. Either the power up will get activated upon picking up or the player will have to manually activate it. All power ups will get consumed when picking up. So you can only carry one at a time.

I'm looking forward to next week to show you all some better looking examples of what the fundamental systems are capable of!