Hey everyone and welcome to the second week of our production sprint! This week we are working on multiple aspects of our game to make sure everything comes together nicely. Mechanics are being tested and tweaked as we speak and the building blocks for the level are taking form. 

First up Island slicing:

We used Houdini to slice our island meshes so that when pieces of the map break of, it looks more naturally. If we pre-sliced it all by hand in 3ds Max we would have more work and it won't look as good.

Blocks and shaders:

Our normal block that the players can interact with has a final form and is ready to build a super high tower with! We created a toon shader to add some extra 'wow' to the style of our game and an outline shader for items that the player can interact with.

The character:

For our character we wanted a base mesh that we could use for every player so the rigging and animations would go faster and easier. To distinguish each player we are going to give them all a different mask with different shapes and we'll use different colors in the texture to make sure there is no confusion while playing. Character fully unwrapped and ready for rigging and a color test to see how much detail we should put in the texture.

Player animations:

After animating the character we wanted to see what it looked like in the engine. After all it's better to check in the beginning and change it than do it last-minute right? We want our players to look little and cute in the game so that when they run around with the blocks, the blocks are bigger than the players. We created a basic animation controller and it works! 

Character mask designs:

Because our players need to be easily recognized on screen, we made a bunch of masks to check if the shapes get across nicely on screen for a co-op game. After all, the players need to know which character they have in game.

Tower destruction:

If a player destroys another tower we want it to fall down. However, we saw that if you play tested this, the other player would just break down their own tower and use those boxes that fell down to quickly build it back up to earn more points. To prevent this from happening we made sure that some of the normal blocks break when they fall down so the player cannot use these anymore.

Temple:

Our main building in our scene to make it more inca themed is a temple. Since the goal of building towers is for the Sun God it would only be fitting to add a temple in there.  We did a concept first and then modeled it. Now we are working on making Tileable textures.