In space no one can hear you scream

We're adrift in the void, and life-support systems are breaking down.
Too many weeks of limited team operationality have caught up with us.
At this stage of the project we are expected to go into full feature freeze and enter the final polish sprint.

In the face of this inconvenience, we've had to pare down or scrap quite a bit of our original ideas,
in order to get something out that is at least playable.

While I've tried to paint everything in the best light possible with the previous devlogs,
there's little I can do this week but list the facts.

Gameplay object spawns

A spawning system for the gameplay objects is in place, which guides what objects spawn when and where, and in what direction they float through the playing area. It can be used as a single instance that is fairly random (totally random at this point, but once I've hammered out a few bugs it'll be more directable), or as a group of more specific instances to get greater control.

Weapons/Pickups

Our weapon system mechanics are complete or nearing completion, and the inventory system that allows players to actually collect them is in place. There is still an issue with actually spawning the objects, Unreal won't allow adding these to the level due to issues in the code.
Hopefully we'll be able to resolve this fairly soon.

Player select and spawning

A full rewrite of the player select system has been implemented, fixing quite some issues that were present in the original solution.

Animations & Sound

The art team has moved on to investigate how we'll implement sound and animations in the game (aside from blueprinting the spawning system mentioned earlier). There was little use in creating much more extra assets because chances are these were never going to make it in the game in time.

The road ahead

While we'd rather have tied the RFX and UI into the game logic already this week, we've had to shift these tasks to the polishing sprint in favor of helping out with getting a set of working, coherent mechanics first. We'll revisit this in the coming week.

On the dev side, the next two weeks will be dedicated to getting the most bang for our - admittedly extremely limited - buck, mechanics-wise.

Signing out,

Team Sumonauts