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

This week was a busy one - even though we already started creating assets and working on character rigs and animation, there still was and is a lot to do. But we really wanted to implement some assets ingame and had a lot issues to fix to reach that point!

Game Assets

Last week, we started the Production Sprint 1 by creating Environment Assets, but this week, our main focus were the three Characters: The Monster (Player-Character), Human (NPC) and Priest (NPC).

Protagonist

The Protagonist made a lot of trouble, not only last week but still in this one.  Even though most issues weren't that big, there were a lot of small problems with the rigging and skinning and it took way longer, than we hoped it would, until we could start animating. But we did it, and finished the first and probably most important one: The walk cycle.

 

NPCs - Human and Priest

Luckily, we were able to fix some issues regarding the import to the  animation tool mixamo: The rigging and skinning process, still wouldn't work entirely for the human and priest, so we had to do that manually. 

But after finishing the rig and skin for the human, we could import it to mixamo and use the animations on it, so we saved A LOT of time, not having to manually animate everything, like we have to do for the protagonist.

The priest isn't yet at a point, where we could actually start with the animation, since it's non-existent legs (the robe) are causing some problems. Here you can see, what the rig of the priest currently looks like:

Environment 

Apart from working on the characters, we also designed some more props for the environment, which will be created in 3D in the following weeks and created.

We also created the typical yellow-ish texture for the Backrooms walls and carpet for the floor (which could already be seen in the background of the animation gif of the protagonist):

Programming

Similar to the last week, this week, we continued working on implementing the mechanics, based on our prototype, while keeping the performance and code quality in mind.

The main mechanics we focused on during this week - apart from optimizing all existing ones, were the Dash and Attack, and the destroying the generator and closing door mechanics.
Of course, we still kept working on the AI and its behavior, so now it runs away from the player to another waypoint.

Apart from that we also started implementing a basic in-game user HUD.

Where are we going from here?

This week was the last week of our first Production Sprint! What does that mean? We will enter Production Sprint 2! 
In general, Production Sprint 2 is quite similar to the first one: We will continue creating assets and finishing those, that we already started. Of course we well also continue implementing the mechanics and AI into the game.
As for the next week, we will continue focusing on the Priest and Protagonist characters (animations), as well as environment assets. 

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

See you next week!