Shade and Stone is now wrapping up the 3rd week of development, once again I'm Ella, narrative designer, and I'll be sharing with you what everyone's been up to this week.

~Design~

For Braedyn, he's been working on making the cinematics for our game ending as well as a small intro scene! This also includes designing and programming and functional pause menu with a working options menu. Improving from feedback given by the team as well as supporting everyone on general tasks, which include level design, small set dressing needs, and playtesting certain mechanics and dynamics.

Over the last week, Connor as the level designer has experimented with implementing the team's art assets into the first iteration of the level, seeing how we can construct the game's level and best illustrate our environmental storytelling using them. Additionally, he has also started and is near completion of a second iteration of the level, which has feedback applied to from the design teacher when asked about the first impression of our semi-finished first iteration. The feedback included 'make the level more of a labyrinth' and  'include a spiral-like section where you obtain the ratify (rat transformation) ability, as well as rat holes throughout the map to foreshadow the aforementioned ability. He is yet to test much of the player controller and enemy in all of the game's level, however of course some testing has been made. And as regards to the prototype, it is now feature-complete and all that is left is to add content.

In collaboration with artists in the team, Thomas O has been working on implementing UI assets and setting up our menus.

On Monday, Kian,  along with Ella, headed out to a local college to go and test the Milestone 1 version of the game due to privacy reasons for the students there weren't any images to show from the session, but there was plenty of useful feedback that we received. The team is in the process of utilising this feedback from the target audience to help improve the game.

This week Ella has been working on making the final blockouts for the environmental narrative, this has included placing in a lot more skeletons and cloaks than last time. She's also defined our levels zones providing them with names so she can explore each area's stories.

~Art~

Noah has been drawing the textures of the leaves while making the models for the foliage and making it fit the art style whilst still remaining low poly, appealing to look at and fully optimised.

Using Star's Concept Art, Belle created the Sculpt for the Talisman Hero Asset, and Retopologized the sculpt to a low poly mesh then UV Unwrapped. 

After UV Unwrapping Belle baked the Sculpt onto the Low Poly and masked out the details, then was passed onto Star for texturing and adding emissions. This is the final result.

Star created updated concepts for our Golem so he was scarier and more intimidating. She also created this whimsical illustration of Koshaw taking a nap with his rat pal.

~Programming~

This week Thomas Baker has been working on getting our checkpoint system working. It's been a massive undertaking and the gifs below certainly prove the effort that's been put in.

Hudson has been working on getting our new Koshaw model into the game and making sure the cloak has physics and moves around with the player. He's also been working on other aspects of the game including; the camera following the player, the player checkpoint system and fixing various things to do with the rat.

Will has been working on the enemy suspicion system this week. He has put a lot of effort into getting this working and it is looking awesome right now!