Great news!

After two weeks of pitch, yaw and rolling with the punches, two members of our dev team will be back in action starting the following week.
Expect more progress in the weekly updates, we should be reaching cruising velocity fairly soon!

Logo tweaks

As you can see above, we took our logo a step further, electing a less serious look and aiming to better capture the feel of our concept.
The four colored dots represent our four sumonauts, duking it out in the arena!


Shady business

Gert has been doing a little more experimenting with shaders and particle effects.
The main developments for this week are:

A dynamic material which serves to indicate the bounds of the arena (which are essentially the screen edges, but we feel more visual cues are in order). When a player comes near these bounds they are highlighted in that player's color.

Finishing touches on the gravitational pull effect. While we don't want this effect to be overpowering, having only the refraction effect was a bit underwhelming. I tried to amplify the whole by having light rippling and skittering along the surface and having particle trails accelerate towards the gravitational center. Next to that I added some panning noise to break up the perfect circularity of the effect.

Finally, because a man can't spend all day every day playing with shader noodles, I started working on some basic spacecraft debris (on which our sumonauts will be able to bounce to their heart's content in the near future).

Building character

Meanwhile, Witse has been soldiering on with our character model.

Vitalized, energized and verly nearly retopologized, with extra electrolytes!

Heroic returns

Senne spent the last couple of days getting back up and running.
All system checks are completed and he is ready for launch!
His primary concern getting started has been building the character movement system

While our game is set in space, we found out the hard way that accurate vacuum, zero-gravity movement isn't necessarily the most fun way to move around the playing field. Senne has been hard at work nudging values, looking for the right amount of drag to make you 'feel' like you're free-floating, without having you shoot off never to be seen again.

Prepare for landing sequence

The coming weeks marks the end of production sprint one, luckily we'll have most of our team back this week, and we'll burn the midnight fuel catching up, so we'll be able to start off sprint 2 back on track!

End of log, over and out