Development Update 1 - Week of 2/20/17

Aha! This page is more than dev interviews!

In addition to the interviews, which will continue being a weekly element, there will be periodic development updates, where the progress of the game gets posted and briefly talked about. To avoid excessive posting, this will rely on meaningful, in-game, viewable elements. The posts might not all be positive, but they'll try to remain informative.

Without further delay, the first update:

While we always knew we wanted a car combat game, the reasoning behind why the cars were fighting got ignored. After a few meetings, we have a more solid motivation - the player's escaping a ruined city with supplies, attempting to bring them back to a larger, safe settlement. However, bandits on the road mean that the gates are closed until the player deals with the threat.

With the groundwork for the theme and reasoning laid out, Alia has a stronger idea of what to try and invoke with the concept art, which by extension helps influence the available gameplay options and affordances.

After some setbacks with getting code implemented and making Unreal behave, the code team is now moving past framework and structure into gameplay elements. The car can now be controlled using a steering wheel and gear shift created by the art team, and the demo car features collisions and basic physics.

Video of test 1:

 Video of test 2:

There's still work to be done in terms of tuning those controls, but it's nice to see the VR interactions, like starting the car by grabbing the steering wheel, getting formed and demoable.

Currently, Noah Kellem is working on creating a preliminary car model, so that Jay can begin tweaking her AI code based off of the given dimensions, to make the opponents move more realistically. Palermo's going to continue refining the car's movement, while Fediaczko keeps developing the player's VR interactions.

Alia's working on continued concept art to help refine the themeing and aesthetic, while Aidan's constructing different skins for the steering wheel. Lastly, Luke's had limited things to animate, so he's pitching in on creating various small props, like water bottles or medical crates, to give a library of assets.

We hope to have a playable interaction with AI by Friday, 2/24. Currently, it's a matter of integrating Jay's existing codebase in C++ with Blueprints, which is proving it's own interesting challenge.