Raise the sails, full speed ahead! We arrived at our first production sprint this week!

Welcome to devlog 04 of FullBroadside, our chaotic PVP boat combat game where you take each other down to earn the most points in the game and let yourself be called the victor.

First off, we nailed some extra details down to have a more clear and focused idea of what the game loop will look like exactly. We tried to raise the stakes in our game and add that risk factor that gives an adrenaline boost while playing. The point system is more thought out and we determined some important values we'll need in the future.

Our first point on the agenda was starting our backlog, a list of all possible tasks that we'll have to do to make the actual game. From this backlog, we selected the most important tasks for our first production sprint and made a plan to be able to start as fast as possible.

Progress talk:

Now about production! Our goal for this week was to have the movement down and a block out of the level. 

Art progress:

Art-wise, the islands have been blocked out, and some foliage meshes have been modeled, unwrapped, and textured to scatter around the island which will serve as our barrier to not make the play around too big. Rocks and small props like a chest and a coin have also been made to help populate the island more and add visual interest. Very importantly, the design for our ships has been made and has also gone through the process of modeling, unwrapping, and texturing. Of course, these are all first passes for now and are subject to maybe change in the future.

Also, we made some progress on a blockout for our big boss, the Kraken. It has been placed inside the level as part of the level decoration for now and is a help in setting up the camera perspective, more about this later.

Continuing about the art for the game, a first version of the water shader has been added already too! One of the artists made sure to have two different versions of the shader, a calmer version and a stormy one. The stormy version will be used during the boss battle with the Kraken to add that extra spice to the game. The calmer one will then be used during the more PVP-focused part of the game, the early game.

Another shader that has been made, for testing purposes for now, is the shader for the Power-Ups that are going to be in the game. The shader needs to depict a stylized version of a water bubble where the icon of the Power-Up will be inside of it later on.

We also made our master shader for all the meshes. It is a pretty simple shader for now, knowing that we will make use of gradient textures mostly for all the props, so no fancy math or whatever is needed as of yet.

Programming/sound design progress:

Now about some programming and sound design! The programmers have established the movement again with the actual ship mesh already. There has also been made some progress on the sounds of our game. Our sound designer started with using the powerful tools in MetaSounds to create his own random pitch and volume player for sound variation very similar to Wwise's Ssfx container but inside Unreal.

Until next time!

- the FullBroadside crew