Hello and welcome to our second devlog!

This week our team has worked hard bringing a playable Prototype. The art book is well on its way, and the Environment is starting to get shape. We are working hard to get started on our Production Sprints as soon as possible.

Art

So far, our art bible is about halfway done. We gathered our ideas together and started sketching them out. After some sketching around we decided our player character will be axolotls in dinosaur costumes.  Who wouldn't wanna play as an axolotl?

Since the plants are dinosaur plants, it took us a little bit of trying to find the perfect mixture between plant and dinosaur. The left sketch is our second state of the plant: a dinosaur butt sticking out of the ground. The right one is the 3rd and 4th stage of our plant, a big and full-grown Dino plant that's ready to throw hazards your way.

We messed around more with shaders and effects, we have decided to go for a hand painted style, so the default unity  PBR shader would be the best. Besides that, we could add an outline on certain objects using a separate shader. 

Animation

We messed around and made a quick block out of a player character. We put it in Mixamo to see what results that would give. We still have the plants we have to animate ourselves, since it is not possible to use Mixamo for those. we could look into using Mixamo for our player characters. But for now it seems better animating ourselves and using Mixamo animations as a placeholder. 

Environment

This week we did the blockout of the level. A jungle level with some storytelling elements, like a treehouse and a campfire.

The playable space should be a bit bigger, right now the " not playable environment" occupies too much of the screenspace.

Prototype

A small prototype is now playable, the upcoming week we can test out and see what works nicely and what doesn't. Discuss solutions to issues we might have and start slowly on our production phase. 
Sadly, we did not manage to have all of what we wanted if not the base mechanics which are still buggy in some parts.
We tried including multiplayer but there is still issues with that too.

So far the player can move the pots, seeds, fertilizer and water around. The seeds can be placed into the pot, when they get watered they grow into seedlings and when they get fertilized they turn into their dino form. 
All the assets get spawned from a specific part of the map only when the one that has been spawned already is taken away.

We wanted to have the plants spawn the fuel too in order to have a simple gameplay against time and with the goal included but we didn't have enough time to do that as we encountered A LOT of bugs while trying to do the basic behaviors. 
We wish we could have done more for this week, but we look forward to next week in order to bring you more content!

Thank you for the read, and see you next week!