Welcome to week 3 of our devlog for SKalley!

We have officially finalized all of our design choices this week. This means we have a finished tech Doc, Sound Doc, Art Bible, and Game Design Model. We would love to share with you our progress on some of these developments.

Art
Texturing:
For our texturing, we are going to use flat color and handpainted by hand. Gradient is also present for shades and color variation. Harsh lines define our smaller details. We promptly attempted one example to test it out. The result turned out pretty nice for now!

Character Design:
After some feedback, we have noticed and agreed that our initial character looked like a "Penis" by total accident, and rightfully so, with the right coloring, this is basically what we see.

We decided to revise the entire design philosophy of character design and found a much better baseline. The head and legs of the character are exaggerated while its torso is reduced to a smaller size. 

With the character shape philosophy settled, we set our focus on the coloring of the characters as we find this very important in a couch party game, the players need to clearly know who is who and where they are without much difficulty, for this we decided to always paint the hair in the player's respective color. Along with accentuating similar colors on their clothing. But to keep a healthy balance we decided to not go more then 50% of the player color.

With that settled, we went ahead and created some concept arts for possible character designs. You can refer those designs in the previous image.

Animations:
For animations we also tried making use of Mixamo and came across a nice template we can use and expand upon in the future. Here's our skater in action!

Shaders:
We experimented with shaders in Unity. We're thinking of replacing hard shadows with "Posterization" gradients where they fade into thinner lines / smaller dots. The color remains consistent and does not fade away. Please take note that this is a highly work-in-progress shader.

Programming

We have officially chosen to further develop our game in Unity. This was after a long and careful consideration, but we noticed that the implementation of mechanics went much faster and smoother within Unity than in Unreal. This decision has set our progress a bit back, but we are steadily recovering from this, and by next week, we hope to continue at full steam.

Procedural Endless "Runner"
After careful and thorough research we have decided that the most logical and best way to progress through the level is by a moving camera forcing the players to keep up with it. 

The Camera:
The camera moves at a steady pace in a constant direction and any players outside its view will be eliminated.

The level:
With the help of prefabs and an array, we can randomly spawn a section once the cube (with a triggerScript) after passing through a collision trigger.



The character:
We have reimplemented the dash and added a smooth rotation to the character for movement.

Multiplayer:
We finally added multiplayer support, and players can join up to 4 and play together, but right now joining is a little too sudden as the game will start playing immediately, but we plan by next week to fix all this and have a solid base for interacting with each other.

Up next is the first Production phase. We're excited to really start get going on this game, and can't wait to share what else we have in store in the coming weeks.

See you next week!