As the country is going in lockdown and people are raiding the stores for that last roll of toilet paper, we struggle with a smaller problem from the safety of our dorms: this week we went from our prototyping phase into the production phase, so it was time to pick a name for our game. We all agreed it needed to be something funny, something short but striking, something that fits the energetic and hectic coop gameplay we are aiming for. We started brainstorming for names, but finding a clever pun with Submarine or Diving, was suprisingly hard. Several names were coined, like "What's Sub", "Deep Down", "Ocean's 4" and my personal favorite, "Alti-dudes", were brought up, but in the end we settled for "Up with the Sub!"

With a working title on our project, it was time to get to work. At this point, we were running a week behind on schedule, so a lot had to be done. After assesment of the issues with our prototype, we realised we needed to make some changes to our approach of setting up the code of our game. Luckily, our programmers discovered the magic of Component based coding with Unity. It turns out to be suprisingly efficient and easy once you have some functionality down, to transfer it to other objects in your game. Got a health system for your player character? Just slap it on the submarine too! Or on that enemy shark. Maybe even those rocks, or that treasure chest.

After playing around with it a bit, we managed to implement the Diver and the Submarine in our new version. The Diver got a nice upgrade since last time thought, cause now he is able to dash and attack! The dash turns out to be very fun to move around with and also quite strong. Especially when dashing away from the submarine, you suddenly find yourself in a thug of war with your captain, with the stretchy rope desperatly trying to keep our aquatic explorer close to home. At one buggy point during testing we even managed to get the Diver to launch itself of screen nearing the speed of sound, with the rope just stretching to infinity. At this point we decided that the Diver needed to be handicapped a bit and we implemented the oxygen system, that kills the Diver when he runs out. Unfortunately for the poor guy, there is no way to refill oxygen yet, so after about 10 seconds of play, he always ends up sleeping with the fishes...

On a brighter note, the Diver and Engineer both got their new looks, as well as some funky moves to go with them. Our little guys now have animations for walking, swimming, pressing buttons and many more things. Our artists found a method to build up the characters with reusable  assets, which makes it really simple to get the same animations for every character once it is made for one. This ended up in some silly combinations, like Engineer making a stab attack with his wrench or Diver trying to do some reparations with his harpoon.

Somewhere down the line, there was a bit of a scare when our shared project files were suddenly out of sync. It started with one animation of Engineer swimming, losing its meta file when being moved around folders, but it escalated from there, until there were several different folders for different Engineers, with helpful names as "Old Engineer," "Engineer 2", "Engineer with Errors". We spend a couple of hours getting rid of every one of them, until only the one and true Engineer was left. Pretty ironic that the guy whose only job is fixing things, needed so much work to be fixed.

As the characters are getting fleshed out, the world around them is also starting to get form. We chose for a more paintery art style for the environment, to create a clear distinction between what the players can interact with and what is just there to set the mood. The atmosphere we are going for is this world that's both mysterious and exciting, with its inhabitants being  wacky and strange, but also kind of scary. Some of the shapes feel almost alien, which we hope creates the urge to explore. Also, we added a fishman statue, which could be a hint to a future enemy!



With our weekly deadline closing in, the submarine is in need of some attention as well. We named the game after it just now after all.  Each rooms in the submarine is getting its own health and damage counter. The more damage the submarine receives on one side, the more water starts pouring in. Flooded rooms won't be useful until Engineer comes in to drain and fix them. Since there is no enemies yet, the only way to damage a room for now is if one of the players presses a button. Now that I think of it, one player trying to take down the sub may actually be kind of fun, maybe we should turn it into a PvP game after all!



Clearly the visuals need some more attention though. So that's what our plan is for next week, giving the submarine a bit of a visual makeover. Also, including a couple of enemies, a gun to shoot them with and some loot as a reward would be a nice next step in our development process.