It's once again time for another devlog, welcome back everyone!
We're in the second week of production. All of us have been working hard and we've made a lot of progress.

Programming

No more broken noses from stopping abruptly

The ship should now handle slightly more naturally. It will decelerate at a slow pace instead of instantly stopping and the speed doesn't get reduced as hard when turning anymore.

Surprise Supplies

We've implemented a spawning system that follows a square mesh (that can be scaled and translated at will!). 

The spawn system will spawn X amount of supply crates each minute (right now it is set to 600 for testing purposes, will obviously be lower in the game). The system also allows every supply crate to have an individual "spawn chance". For testing purposes 2 crates have been included, a red one and a green one. The green one has a 99% chance of spawning and a red one 1%.

As we are planning to add mountains later, we thought of a way to block spawns on certain spots. A level designer can just drag a prefab in to prevent spawns. The prefab contains a circle mesh.

Storms a brewin' 

Did someone leave a window open? The wind is now reworked and feels like actual wind! How strong mother nature blows is now adjustable at runtime as well which gives room for storms!

Cannonballs

Good news! We have now implemented violence into our game. The player now has the ability to shoot cannonballs out of the left or right side of the ship. You can fire cannonballs by either pointing the right stick to where you want the cannonballs to go, or just using the triggers to shoot left or right (note that when aiming with right stick, the cannonballs still only come out of the left or right side of the ship: using the stick doesn't give a advantage to aiming).  There are currently 4 different types of cannonballs:

Default Ammo:

Average size, average fire rate, good damage.

Mini Ammo:

Small size, fast fire rate, low damage.

Big Ammo:

Large size, slow fire rate, high damage.

Shotgun Ammo:

Average size, slower fire rate, lower damage, shoots 3 shots at the same time.

Art

Particles

Three new particles have been added. Smoke and fire signify the damage states going from "oh noes" to "say your prayers" respectively.
To give you feedback that you are indeed shooting, a shooting particle has been implemented using the pre-existing tilesheets of the previous effects.

With three important tilesheets already created, we're now looking into reusing where possible as to not bloat the game files. Creating new tilesheets for every little thing would impact performance and size dramatically which we of course want to avoid. These particles are still subject to change and might look completely different once the post processing has been decided on.

Mountains - Level

The mountains have been updated!
We now have three base variations. Grass is no more only at the top, but also on other up facing surfaces; it is also textured and has an opacity map so that there is not a flat line as transition between grass->rock.
The rock uses a biplanar projection shader, as a projection from the top wasn't needed and it was difficult to match it with the other surfaces because of how the texture is made (hand-painted and with the detail in there). The grass uses only a projection from the top.

The shader itself has been fixed since last week: now it's not shiny anymore!
One of the advantage of using projected textures is that they automatically vary with the position of the asset, while maintaining the same scale even if the asset is scaled (e.g.: a smaller mountain shouldn't have smaller grass); this is true also when scaling non uniformly, the textures will not stretch! Thanks to this we can:

• Save time on UV unwrap as they are not really needed;
• Avoid manually painting every mountain;
• Have basically an infinite amount of mountains with only three assets.

We now have a first iteration of the level map. Next? Clouds!

Airship!

Our first player model is finished! Meet the mythical moon rabbit airship:

In Chinese mythology, the moon rabbit is known to make medicine for the immortals. The hull of the airship is inspired by Chinese junk boats in order to fit the East-Asian theme. 

The model was made in 3dsMax, Photoshop and Substance Painter were used for texturing.

What's next?

We'll be implementing new supply drops and will start working on the sound design. There will also be new particles and post processing updates in the future.

Until next time!