Devlog 4 - Testing and First Prototypes

Hello there!

We hope you are just as excited for a new Devlog as we are!

This week was mainly focused on finishing and showcasing our first prototypes, through which we could display what we have accomplished this far.

More specifically, we put our efforts into making 3 different prototyes:

- The "Co-op Test" prototype, which displays the whole workflout of the desired final product (with a start menu, an options window, a lobby and a character selection screen) and a level with a few planets to be explored by a pair of players (yes, that means the networking is finally working with the ragdolls! Huzzah!!).

- The "Singleplayer Level Test" prototype, which also contains the various menus stated above but focuses on a singleplayer level in which the player must solve a puzzle in order to retrieve a spacecraft component.

- The "Cable Test" prototype, which aims to exhibit how the cable connecting both players is going to interact with the game's elements and the character's themselves.

The best of all is we've uploaded all these prototypes to our itch.io page, so you can try them out, better accompany our progress and deliver us some much-welcomed feedback!

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Per Member Report

Guilherme "Kob" Pereira
Hello! Unity's Netcode learning curve continues to prove itself to be as steep as I had NOT  hope. There were some problems trying to connect all the prototypes the team did over the weeks as we had to adapt them so networking worked correctly (for the most part). Unfortunately, there are still some bugs with the animations over the network as they work correctly for each player, but the other one appears to be in an intimidating t-pose. Hopefully we can figure this out this next week.

Miguel "Yoshi" Belbute
Hello everyone! Guess what? Turns out that combining the non-local multiplayer services with a complex character avatar (like a ragdoll with multiple behaviors) is not an easy task... But fret not, for we have managed to overcome this challenge, which in retrospect was probably the most challenging aspect of the game's prototype (at least for me). In the end, I had to somewhat refactor the ragdolls so their scripts were mostly centralized in a single network object. The ragdolls still act as... well, ragdolls, but now they are strictly performing animations and physically reacting to movement while the movement itself is handled by the aforementioned network object (it's just an invisible ball but shhh, don't tell a soul). Despite some bugs and weird interactions, I'm pretty pleased with the end result!

Carolina "Carol" Brás 

Hello! This week I dedicated all my effort to creating the Singleplayer Level Test to be shown in our laboratory. I created scripts and new models to try to incorporate some key points of our game:

• Puzzle solving: I created a simple puzzle where the player has to fit 2 cubes of different colors into their respective windows of a structure. Inside that structure, there was a spacecraft component.
• Oxygen management: I created a script to manage the player's oxygen. Unfortunately, despite the code working, I didn't have time to implement the UI, so this prototype has a bug - the UI bar doesn't update when the player collects oxygen from an oxygen dome. In this level, I wanted to demonstrate a part of exploration since players are required to explore the world to find the cubes that are the "keys" to the puzzle and they have to find an oxygen dome to replenish their oxygen levels.

Alexandra "Alex" Pato 

Hello, there! Starting at the end of last week, I've been becoming increasingly well-acquainted with Unity's Joint System, which I'm using to build...the cable! I've gained an even greater amount of respect for my teammates, who were already working with Unity's Built-in 3D Physics previously.

The cable is built of smaller sausage-like parts, which are interconnected by (currently) Character Joints. They attach to the players the same way - except, sometimes, they exercise a little too much force upon each other, even without tugging...and go rogue, invalidating their original wavy effect.

To combat that, I've experimented with Spring Joints, for a greater stretch factor (ended up too stretchy); and with a mix of Configurable Joints and Spring Joints, to help ease configuration (ended up too static).

I've learned a lot, this week, and had a good time at it too! When bugs come up, they're amusing; and once I fix them, I'm a little wiser each time.

André Sezões

Carlota Libreiro