Hello and welcome back to another Devlog of "The Backrooms"!

This week was the first week of production and we created a lot of assets, started rigging characters and programming the different mechanics to refine, what we've started in the prototyping-phase!

Game Assets

In the previous weeks we collected and created a lot of concepts and already started working on some of them to turn the 2D concepts into 3D assets for our game. This week, we continued with that work and were able to finish 3 Assets and some of the character models.

Protagonist

Of course the monster that is roaming the backrooms, which is controlled by the player, is one of the 3D models we worked on this week. We were able to finish the model including the textures. You can see the final result in the following picture:

Obviously, the player character is moving and thus needs animations - to be able to animate, we first have to rig and skin the 3D model.  Even though its appearance is humanoid, it isn't humanoid enough to use the rigging-tool mixamo, so we have to rig and skin it manually. It still needs some small changes to make animating it in the next week a bit more convenient, but for the most part, the rigging and skinning process for the main character is finished. 
This is what the character -mesh looks like, including its rig:  

NPCs - Human and Priest

Of course, apart from the Protagonist, the Human and Priest NPCs are a very important part of the game as well, so this week, we started working on them as well.
As you can see in the following pictures, the models including the textures for the Human and Priest NPCs are already finished and ready for rigging!

Both of these characters have "a little more human proportions", so the auto-rig created with mixamo works a lot better, than it does for the protagonist. It still has some small issues, especially for the hands, so we will definitely need to work on this problem in the following week.

Other Assets

Our game does not only consist of these three characters - we also need assets for the environment (e.g. the desk we already worked on in the last week) and assets for the different mechanics, related to the environment - like the doors or the generators. 
The generator is part of an important mechanic in our game, so we wanted to create the 3D model for it already early on. It can be destroyed, so we will need a "normal" model and the destroyed version of it.
This week we finished the asset for the working generator:

Even though all the other objects in the environment have muted colors, we decided to add some more saturated ones to the generator, to make it stand out more and show the player, that they can interact with it (= destroy it).

Apart from the generator, we also created other assets, which will decorate the backrooms, like the lamp and chair, which you can see in the following pictures:

Programming

Apart from all the work on the "art side", we also worked a lot on the programming of the game. 

As you might have already seen in last week's prototype, most mechanics were already implemented then. But this week, we rebuilt them from scratch and designed these mechanics based on the implementations in the prototype. Our goal is, to improve the performance and to make sure, that the code quality is good enough for a release build.

The main mechanics we focused on during the past week were the movement and dash (sprint), as well as a default AI behaviour for the NPC's. As mentioned above, the character rigs and animations are still WIP, so we worked with placeholder-cubes for now, which will be replaced later on in the production.

Where are we going from here?

This week was only the start of the production, and it will continue in the following weeks. We definitely plan to finish the protagonist and some of its basic animations, so that it's ready to get implemented into the game (because it will make a huge difference to run around with an actual character, than just "running" around with a box).
We will also continue creating assets and textures for the environment as well as continue working on the NPCs and their rigs and animations.

If you should have any feedback or questions, feel free to leave a comment!

See you next week! :)