Working on projects while being quarantined be like

Introduction

This week, the main goal of our team was to create a first rough working level, combining all the work of the art team and development team. We made some extra assets, added some new effects, fixed bugs, adjusted the camera setup, etc. As this sprint is the final sprint of production, it's become a race against the clock to add in the most wanted mechanics before the feature lock goes into effect. We are close to having the base mechanic of the bomb passing and the mechanics built on that finished. We also finished a first version of the level, this time using all the currently finished props instead of just a blockout. This way we get a good idea how the level will look like in the end. 
Questions we asked ourselves this week were:

• What map layout suits our game best?
• Which tasks of the development team can be transferred to the art team if necessary?
• Do we make props immovable objects or, if not, how do we implement something that does not make them a hindrance?
• What still needs to change to make the car feel nicer?

Art

This week, a lot of time went to testing out blockouts and creating a first version of a level with all props implemented. We started out creating a vast amount of different blockouts to test.

After testing them internally and externally with friends, we decided on a layout and made a first version of the map with all finished assets.

Besides creating a first map, we also implemented some adjusted FX and created a system for a destructible environment.
First of, we adjusted the explosion of the bomb to be a big bigger and a little bit more dramatic, adding some flying embers.

Besides that, we also made a script to make certain props destructible.

We destroy the props by using an adjusted version of unitycoder's SimpleMeshExploder script (https://github.com/unitycoder/SimpleMeshExploder). It takes every polygon of the mesh it interacts with and makes a new mesh out of it by adding a single vertex with an offset and connecting the edges of the poly with that vertex, creating a small pyramid shape.

Some of Huberts First Animations for Drifting, Driving and getting Hit.

Lastly, we also tried to make a first lighting+post processing setup. Now that we switched back to the Built-In Render pipeline, we can make full usage of the post processing stack V2.

Programming

Since the car movement is our main mechanic, we decided to spend this week on improving this. The current state is definitely not finished, but it's getting better!

The player is now able to fly through the air by going over speed bumps. These values still have to be tweaked a little, but the base is already there!

Previously the car would take the same rotation when driving on a slope as when driving on the ground. This isn't realistic and doesn't look fun at all. So we changed this system. Now the car changes rotation depending on the surface it's driving on.

In the previous version, the car immediately stopped when you released the button. Now we made it more realistic! The car will keep going forward until the velocity is zero (aka there is friction between the ground and car now)!

Other small changes we did:

• Fixed couple of car movement bugs
• The player is still able to rotate in the air but a lot slower than on ground
• Inverted rotation direction when driving backwards
• Player(s) with the bomb have a small speed boost
• Disabled car movement in the air