Devlog 07 - First Week Second Sprint

Hello world!
Welcome to yet another week at Jointed, our first week of the second sprint! This sprint will be another 3 weeks long and is our last shot at getting any MAJOR updates and features in. Here's a quick recap of what we did during our first week:

Artists:

This week, Stan made some final adjustments to the level blockout to polish the overall flow before moving on to important visual effects. He focused heavily on developing the "cage effect" for the bond mechanic — ensuring it dynamically circles around the players in a smooth and visually striking way. 

Alongside the VFX work, Stan also kicked off the environment set dressing by creating key foliage assets such as rocks, plants, and mushrooms, helping to build a rich forest atmosphere all the while staying loyal to the art bibles principles. 

He also started applying Flor’s beautiful custom shader across these assets to unify the visual style of the world. With some minor lighting in the scene, we've already got the shader nicely working:

That's why Stan is exploring Unity’s lighting systems to better understand how to enhance the scene mood, with plans to dive deeper into lighting integration next week.

Hanna spent most of the time giving a unique texture to the two characters, trying to also have the fairy tale feeling with handdrawn expressions and details. 

Unfortunately the two players share the same model due to time constraint, but they are given both a different texture to make them still easily distinguishable. Besides that she also spent time modelling trees, this was done in the program TreeIt, also to save time.

Last but definitely not least, Flor spent some time figuring out how to animate in Maya and then started on animating the characters.

Devs:

Bram spent time on the ui. He cleaned up some code and made it more responsive for multiple display types. He also spent some time decorating the pits.

Elias made 2 of our rotating platforms 1 where the platform is a rotating circle and one where it's platforms rotating around a center point. he also fixed a major bug in the tilting platform and put our camera back to orthographic since we decided that would be better after all.

Mathies fixed the random rotating bug, deleting the brace mechanic in the process as it did not seem useful for the game anymore and too much work to fix. This mechanic is now just the anchor that can be used to pull the other player towards you. He also fixed the weighted platform. For the rest of the week Mathies worked on implementing various sounds into the game.

We hope to be able to show more next week!
Take care!