Devlog 2 - Work, Work, Work!

Greetings everyone!

With this week coming to an end, we can proudly announce we are making great strides in the development of our cosmic adventures...

More specifically, we divided our team so we could simultaneously advance documentation  (such as the game design document and the tech document) and the prototype itself, which we aim to showcase in a few weeks.

Here is a sneak peek of what we've been working on:

Screenshot of ragdoll character holding object, both affected by planetary

Per Member Report

Guilherme "Kob" Pereira 
Hello! This week I developed a multiplayer system based on Unity's NGO, lobby & relay system so we can have multiple play sessions going on. This proved to be challenging due to the need to refactor some code to be in accordance with "The Network". Fortunately, we are able to have private lobbies where we can enter given a keyprovided by the creator of the lobby! This way, we can have two players play the game, each with their own view of it with the same player script running on each copy.

Miguel "Yoshi" Belbute
This week, I worked on bringing our main characters to life! Following multiple tutorials, I implemented a ragdoll which can walk, run, jump and grab objects by utilizing configurable joints and complementary animations. Then, I faced the challenge of combining both the ragdoll mechanics and the gravitational behaviors we had already accomplished with a simple ball - for example, one of the biggest obstacles was altering the character's rotation according to its position on a given planet while maintaining all the physics-based mechanics of the ragdoll. I also played around with the camera movement so it would influence the joints' control (the character's body can now bend over and tilt up in response to where the player is looking).

Carolina "Carol" Brás
This week, I focused on enhancing the user interface (UI) elements of our game.
First I defined which elements should we use in the main menu, lobby menu, and world space scene. Discussed it with the team and we concluded that we would want some kind of inventory for the spacecraft components. This was assigned to me and my work doing the UI began.
The main menu received significant attention, as I completed its design and functionality adding a start button, quit button, and visuals. To enhance the overall visual appeal, I also incorporated a particle system and implemented some fade-out effects.
Moving on, I added UI visuals to the lobby scene, which had already been developed by my colleague. This work is still a work in progress, and further improvements are underway.
Lastly, on Friday, I created a draft for the inventory feature, which will allow players to manage their spacecraft components.

Alexandra "Alex" Pato
I am currently near-finished with the first Game Design Document draft, which became my main responsibility this week. Pretty soon, you'll be able to further in-depth see what Cosmic Cat-Astrophy has to offer!

The following aspects have been developed upon:

- Core experience, with in-detail descriptions of our game's key features;

- A short synopsis of our meowrvelous game;

- A comparison of Cosmic Cat-Astrophy to base references and games we inspired ourselves on;

- Examples of play scenarios from the perspective of player personas;

- A description of the values taken from each persona;

- To-be-further developed conceptual models;

 - Conceptual maps of the core gameplay loops and game models.

André Sezões
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Carlota Libreiro
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