1. Introduction

This week the team started on the polishing phase, in this phase we will look at separate mechanics and write down what can be improved. All the changes from the first week will be discussed underneath. 

2. Animations

The team worked on adding and polishing animations. They are shown below.

2.1 Stun (Polished)

2.2 Pickup Fuel

2.3 Flinch

3. Particles

The team worked on creating several particles for better player feedback. They are shown below.
The flinch effect will be combined with the flinch animation shown above. When the sloth misses the rails and drives below it hitting obstacles laying on the street for instance, the sloth character covers his face and the particle effect with a large exclamation mark and some extras appear above the sloth.  A particle effect to show that the player went through a hoop successfully was created as well. Furthermore, we created a particle effect for the player picking up a fuel can for more boost as well as just an idle effect for a fuel can being available in world and ready to be picked up by the sloth. The idle makes the the fuel cans more visible for the player. Two more effects were created that emphasize the actions of the sloth's jump and speeding up by using the boost. 

3.1 Flinch effect

3.2 Hoop jump

3.3 Rocket fuel pickup

3.4 Rocket fuel idle

3.5 Jump 

3.6 Speed lines 

4. Gameplay elements

The team has worked on polishing some block out elements that still needed an actual prop. We replaced them in the scene.

4.1 Railing

4.1 Wall of boxes

5. Programming

This week the programmers focussed on implementing the particles and animations that our artists made, as well as cleaning up some minor bugs. Here are some highlights.

5.1 Camera

We got a lot of feedback that the camera felt too close at times, and props we obstructing our view in certain sections of the level. So we moved the camera back and changed the angle. Since we were revisiting this part anyway, we also took the chance to improve the way it's handled for our artists. By simplifying the settings a bit the camera can be moved like a normal game object again.

An interesting consideration we had was to  use cinemachine dolly zones. This would allow us to place cameras in all kinds of cool angles during gameplay. But when actually placing them it felt like we'd go back to the problem of not having enough visibility to anticipate incoming obstacles. However it's a cool idea to keep in mind for epic stunt cams in the future!

5.2 Animations!

Last week we gave you guys a glimpse into our lovely spaghetti animatore. This week It was time to clean up! Since we're getting a lot of types of animation it was time to think of some kind of structure. We could have looked deeper into the Unity animator to find some feature to clean it up. But as programmers we like simple solutions. We figured our main animations are idle and moving, and everything else should just be triggerable at any moment. This can of course bring tons of unwanted results, but this solution works with our current level design and the animator is not that huge yet, so this will do! For now.

5.2 Sound!

For the first time our sloth gets to hear the satisfying sound of his skateboard rolling on the ground and grinding the rails.

Sound wasn't really something that was taken into thought much during our development since we don't have a sound engineer. So we don't have systems in place to manage sound appropriately.  But the systems we have in place allow us to easily inject some sound logic into them and we can get a taste of what our world sounds  and feels like!