Endless saving cycles

The university computers seem to be as tired as us by this point. Most of our time this week was stolen by 20 minute saving processes and an opportunist autosave destined to make our life hell by triggering a save whenever we took our eyes off the screen for a moment. Among this we were also plagued by crashes.

This made Dominic's job much more difficult from not only having to work out scripting but having to do it while battling the engine but late this weekend he got the level fully playable and all the puzzles working.

There was finally a return to the second level map for the Hatter's 'Dark World' tea party which hadn't really been touched since the start of the project. Most of this was copying over the tea party laid out in the main level then creating emissive textures for the plants and altering a few things but the atmosphere was pretty much sorted from the second week.

I worked with some of Mark's textures to create masks for the mushrooms so we could apply glowing patterns to the meshes. I did some testing in a separate Unreal file, battling save times along the way, to see if I could come up with a slightly more interesting material other than a basic glow. Remembering a strange material I made back in container city I managed to get a panning material that faded in and out across the mask patterns but the emissive would always come out are green. After a far did of time looking through nodes I thought might help I found one for distance work that had the side effect of mixing shades of blue into the colour. It wasn't quite what I wanted but the results were interesting regardless. 

I also got some low poly rocks sorted out. Not completely sure if they'll get used in the level but they were good practice. Though unfortunately the really nice poly painted texture got absolutely destroyed once it was lowered down to a 512x512 but on the plus size the normals bake came out really nice after a few problems in XNormal which led to me giving up and just projection mapping it,

So onto the final stretch there's a few things to polish, puzzles to stress test and lighting to build, we're hoping for a good final week but this is Game Art so we fully expect the level to simply burst into flames next week.