Altered Course

At long last, after a couple of set-backs, our dev-team is back to full capacity.
We've re-evaluated the scope of the project, agreed on a new hierarchy of critical tasks, and are now on track to get Sumonauts to a playable state ASAP.

Our devs have been nailing down a couple of crucial subjects the past week:
- Player and environmental bouncing
- Player selection, spawn & elimination
- Oxygen Management
- Weapon Inventory

Next week we'll tackle the spawning system that dictates the flow of a round, meaning when, where and how game objects will be spawned.
This includes Spacecraft Debris, Weapon pickups, Hazardous objects, ...
The weapon mechanics will be finalized as much as possible too, leaving everything set up to enter the polish stage of development.

UI

Now that our mechanics are gradually coming alive, we're developing the need to visualize some info to our players,
so what better time to get started on the player HUDs!

In order to not take up too much screen real-estate (especially since we need to display up to 4 HUDs), I've opted to keep everything as clutter free as possible, simply displaying the player's oxygen supply and whichever weapon pick-up they have collected to use.
In order to keep our players constantly moving, and to prevent one player hoarding all pick-ups, we've limited the inventory to one pick-up at a time per player.
This means we can have a single button to activate all pick-ups, and there is no need to display a lot of controls in the UI.
For now there's only 'X (Use)' to display, with a possible 'Drop' command to be included later, which should not be too great a hurdle to incorporate.

Asset Development

Since The HUDs came together a bit faster than I expected, I finally found some time to get my spacecraft assets unwrapped, and the materials set up.
I went with a fairly simple trim-sheet to ensure uniformity and to be able to create extra spacecraft assets later on.
More important than insane graphics was to get clear visual separation between the objects and the background and to distinguish between bounceable and hazardous areas. For this I did a little bit of cheating with fresnel nodes, to fake rimlights.

Witse has kept on keeping on with his assets as well, finalizing the modeling of the pick-up assets, and iterating on the character materials.
Once everything is running in game, we'll add the finishing touches in the polish stage.

All the foundations are in place, the most important thing to do now for our assets is tweaking the materials to unify the look and feel.

Signing off,

Team Sumonauts