Welcome to Gobo Rampage's fourth devlog!

Character design: enemies
Based on the style guide we made, we created the art designs of our adventurer and guard. Both enemies are defined by the color red, meaning we had to make sure they're differentiated by their shape language. Guards are bulky and square, representing their strength and immunity to simple throwables. Adventurers are lean and sharp, representing their speed and mortal danger. We didn't have guards equip any weapons since they use their hands to pin you down. It looked weird and didn't make sense for a guard not to have a weapon, so we gave them a sheathed sword. On the other hand, adventures will be holding onto their weapon.

Character modeling
After creating the art designs for our goblin and the adventurer, we immediately started working on recreating the design in 3D. This brought on a few challenges. From trying to follow our 3D art style choice and applying it to the models to finding the right proportions for our character from a 2D image. Modeling each of the designs took an approx. 5 hours to create (without unwrapping & texturing). 2 Hours to create the basic structure of the characters and 3 more hours to polish and tweak the character to fit in our choice of art style.

UI
For our UI we went with a theme of riches and bright colors. Each piece of our User Interface will be hand painted. So far we've made the designs of the Annoyance bar, powerups and health.

Map layout
The scale of the first map prototype turned out to be too big for our project, so it was necessary to cut some regions. We decided to keep the main "districts" and make them more distinct, not only decoration wise but also shape wise. This way, the market has slightly narrower roads than the main street and the alleyways are slightly deeper. Since we cut the the main height difference in our map, we reintroduced some in the oasis which is now a lot higher up than other districts. Some work went into making the water channels more realistic by making them more concave and flow in the right direction. We have a bridge going over one of those channels now too. The pond for the oasis hasn't been dug yet though. Lastly, the navmesh was checked again so the new height differences don't break anything and block the AI's pathing.

Inheritance
After our prototyping, we wanted to add inheritance to our prank items so meshes wouldn't glitch out. We also wanted to add a way that the player has one thing to focus on, which we implemented at the same time. We played around with a few different methods of checking how to do it. Checking the specific base class of the selected item had a pretty easy solution. We first tried doing it with an unreal enum. This would've been a lot of messing around with setting variables each time we wanted to change something. Turns out the built in Cast function returns a boolean that made it so we can just check the cast and work from there. For storing the items in the inventory, we used a int value and to spawn a new one in, we made an array that stores the template blue prints for what we want to spawn in. The int value we stored in our inventory slots goes together with the index of that template in the array. To indicate what that selected closest thing was that the player could interact with, we wanted an outline on. One of our programmers had some experience with this type of thing but had a some problems doing making this work with c++. So we had to make a connection between the blueprint and base class. The proper uproperty keywords to be able call on something form the class were visibleanywhere and blueprintreadwrite. 

See you next week with another devlog!