Art

Our artists have been working hard to resolve persistant lighting issues and enchance immersion by adding animations to certain meshes. While texture work is still on going, the level is truly coming together.

Character Outline

Implementation went smoother than expected and improves visual readability a lot. We’ll likely refine the effect further over the next weeks, but it’s production-ready for now.

Animation

The animation linking to the player is causing some difficulties. With all the animations made, maybe it's time to pass it along to the programming department.

Start Menu UI

The start menu has been fully drawn, after many redraws and much feedback, it is finally ready. It is now in the project file and is semi-usable. The Play and Quit button work but there is also a Credits button which has yet to be functional. As a bonus, the Scrappled logo is animated and the gears can be seen rotating in the menu. The background is currently empty. But the idea is to have the game as the background.

Code

Patch Notes

• New Features

  • Implemented Conveyor Belt mechanics: Characters now move along with conveyor belts automatically.

  • Improved Total Grapples counter for visual clarity—see how many grapples you have left at a glance.

• Gameplay Improvements

  • Level flow enhanced: Adjusted level design to create a smoother and more fast-paced experience.

  • Grapple mechanic experimentation: Began testing grapple interaction rules, such as what surfaces or objects are grapple-able.

• UI Updates

  • Overhauled various UI elements for better clarity, usability, and visual polish.

Audio

Hi everyone, this week was a lot of housekeeping in addition to figuring out a way to mix different scenes with different audio segments attached. The result was a simple audio mixer script that checks the string name of a scene to then fade in or out music sections, the fades are rough but they do the trick! We have seperate Menu - Gameloop and Round win music. The round win is a bit of an outlier in our context as it exists within the same scene as our game loop, so I had to get creative and just check when said win screen is triggered. Fun stuff!

The music itself is stored in a previously made scriptable object with all bells and whistles we need to modulate, loop or volume control the segments where needed. The transitions can also be set to whatever duration we want, making this a modular solution for any scene and any type of music.

The house keeping I mentioned was mostly volume iteration of some of the many audio mixer group busses we made to further emphasize player specific interactions and feedback and pushing the music a tad more to the background.

For our playtesters out there, please use headphones while playing our game - it sounds amazing that way.

If you want to check out the music I composed and mixed for our game: Scrappled OST by Wouter D.

After finishing the audio related issues and additions I also helped out with revamping our players' visual feedback while grapple hooking around. The arm now shoots out toward the attach point while the arm remains on the players' body.

Notice how the arm is at the end point now, and the arm pivot remains? Cool right? 10 out of 10.

I also worked on optimizing our shadow propagation in our scene as we were getting some undefined behavior on some shadow casting meshes. This was mostly due to how our max shadow distances were defined. This distance is now a larger value, allowing for more shadows to be rendered at all times. I also set most light sources to hard shadow casting or No shadows to further improve performance.