Today’s post will be a short one, as most of this week’s deliverables are still in the pipeline.

In this post:

• The final buggy model — done!
• Trees and (basic) textures!
• Grayboxed cockpits for the player buggy!

The Alpha

Art

Buggies

This week, we’re proud to show the final buggy in the core lineup: the 1940, Beta Theta Pi’s Beta Baby!

With this model done, we’ve reached 9 out of 9 of the target models we wanted to have ready by Alpha. From here on, the artists will shift focus to texturing and generating additional art assets to populate the world.

Time permitting, we hope to revisit the buggy roster to add a few more to the game later in development.

Characters

This week saw the creation of our final three pusher mascots: James Garrett, Farnam Jahanian, and Anne Witchner!

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And up next, we have the models for the AI buggy drivers and the Scotty Mascot:

With the mascot heads and pusher bodies well underway, our character team is gearing up for the beta round of animations and texturing, which will take these characters out of the abstract and into (virtual) reality!

Grayboxed Cockpits

While the bulk of the design team is working on either the design and layouts for the physical experience or the game’s branding, this week was a good time for the art team to start implementing some of the designs that had been iterated through for playtesting.

Interestingly, the results of playtesting were fairly inconclusive for these two designs — it will likely be necessary to revisit these tests after adding some textures to the cockpits, and a UI element or two.

Still, putting these cockpits into the game was a valuable experience for the artists and playtesters, as it gave the immediate impression that the player was in a buggy, instead of just driving a car.

Gameplay

There isn’t much new to say regarding gameplay this week, as tuning is still a work-in-progress and other features are still in the pipeline.

Spectator view, however, has been implemented — but, since it requires two machines to run it via a network, we unfortunately do not have an image to showcase it at this time. Please check back in the future for an update to this post! Update 3/18/2020: Due to closures surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, we were not able to meet in person to take said image

Looking Ahead – Leading into Beta

Bugs in Buggy

Although not technically a bug, one issue that we’re currently dealing with is that we do not have a defined end-state to the game… which means that stuff like this can still happen:

So, to get a clearer idea of what that end-state to the game would be, we had one of our artists — Angelina Shi — prepare a view of what the ending scenery should look like:

For Next Week

Next week, we’re aiming to have in everything that was mentioned last week but fell short, as well as the following:

• Art: progress on the textured buggies and MoCap
• Design updates: Branding and Physical Experience
• As a bonus, a snippet of a recording from the class for use as crowd noise!

See you then!