This week we have made progress on the level decoration, player and enemy animations, and lots of bug fixes and gameplay improvement.

For our enemy characters, we needed to make our own animations, as we could not use Mixamo for them. Rigging, skinning and hand-animating in 3d software however, was still new for us, so it took us a while to get the hang of it. We decided to settle for 3 basic animation loops, as nothing too flashy was needed. A lot of enemies will spawn around the characters and swarm around them, so complex animations would end up makign the scene messy.

We also wanted to get started on the design for our UI. SInce our game is already quite detailed and decorated, we wanted the UI to be clean, simple and to the point. A decorative UI would become too unreadable.

In the four corners, the player icons wil appear with a health bar and the weapon they are currently wielding. Then, in the bottom, there will be a small counter to keep track of the amount of ship parts that have been collected. Around the edges of the screen, little pointers will point towards the parts. And lastly, some simple (A) buttoms will be floating above pickups, fallen friends and drop-off points to clarify to the players that they can interact with it.

Then, the level has been decorated more lush, and a lot of problems have been resolved. The clear seams between textures is now less visible and hidden with plants. More vegatation and rocks have been added to make the level overall feel more grand and lush than it did before. The water shader is now made opaque with a slight blurred transparency , since the full transparency of the water did not turn out to fit out style very well. The foam of the water is also made a bit bigger, to fit the stylized feel of our level.

Another important improvement, was the optimization of the level. The file size of the level was getting too big, and needed to be decreased. A lot of time went into this, as some parts of the level needed to be completely re-done. 

Bugfixes and gameplay improvement:

- The main player spawn is fixed, and does now feel more natural.

- The characters can jump a bit higher 

- Most of the player animations are implemented

- The placeholder enemies are swapped with their correct models

- Startout weapons have been removed

- Weapon pickups are added, which can be found throughout the map

- Tweaked walking and jumping to feel more intuitive