Hello everyone! We are excited to share our progress this week with you. 

Artist Devlog:

This week we made a lot of models and other assets for our game. 

With the water shader, we added foam that reacts to the vertex normals of the object so that we can have procedural foam for the wave meshes. It was quite difficult to pull off but it ended up working out. 

We also made 2 sets of castles for the game, they are going to have 3 levels - indicated by the amount of decorations they have. We started off with a base model and then added extra assets on top within a separate prefab in Unity. The castles look okay - for now - we are hoping to have some time during the polish phase to make them look extra nice. 

We also finished the pearl tower for the game, along with a pearl shader - we wanted some of the subsurface color from normal pearls, but we ended up faking it with a Fresnel effect. 

We also created the textures for the seagull, clam, small rocks and the foliage. For some objects, we used either Photoshop or substance painter while some were made using both programs.  This was done for efficiency's sake, as sometimes it was either easier and faster to work with just one based on the object's shape and UV. 

The crab's texture was entirely created in substance painter with plenty of room for improvement in the polishing phase of the game's progress.  Doing the finishing touches will require an environment to match the colors to.

A quick blue variant was also created to pose as an adversary.

Programmer devlog:

We kept working on the tasks for this sprint. This means implementing the core features of the game in a clean and documented manner.

a lot of stuff we programmed during the prototyping for the terrain and the sea was actually pretty bad, so we had to rethink on how to implement them properly.

Adding and removing terrain became more flexible this week. We now use a brush to 'draw' on the beach and raise the terrain depending on the brush.

( for the actual game, we will be using a round soft brush instead of a crab brush )

We now also use a custom heightmap made by the artists instead of random noise, which looks way better.

We noticed during prototyping, that updating the collision of the mesh took quite some time, so we wrote our own collision script that works for the terrain.

On the other we hand we kept working on some of the other gameplay features. For example the crab movement with controllers, making sure that it's easy to assign which controller for which crab, separating the rotation of the crab from the movement, this caused for some peculiar bugs that gave us a good chuckle.

Or on the other hand, the crab that knows no gravity

Something else that we've been working on was the picking up and dropping of pickups, our buckets, the food and the others, making sure that we also start looking at the interactions between the water and the player and the pickups.

When using the food pickup we are going to make a seagull swoop down and eat the food.