Welcome back, space rugby fans! Yet another week has passed for the development team and we have some nice features to share with you all!

Our artist Jerke has been busy rigging our small characters for future animations, and they are working great!

Jerke has been working on the animations for locomotion of two of the characters in our game. To create the animations, we utilized Mixamo's library of animations, which allowed us to quickly find and customize the animations we needed for our characters. Jerke then implemented the animations in Unreal Engine. As soon as the heavy class character is modelled and ready to go we will go through this process again to give the character some personality in the way it moves!

This week the programmers worked on the black hole that teleports the ball while retaining its velocity. This is sure to create more exciting goal opportunities! In addition, we fixed the loved dashing bug. Everyone liked flying across the field at lightspeed, but speed regulations have been put in place and you will no longer be sent flying when dashing from a ledge. 

Our team of programmers has finished the main gameplay loop! Which means you can now play the game 2v2 and actually have a winner in the end.  On top of that you can now view the status of the game through our HUD, after all even the best astronauts need an overview of their mission.

Lastly we tweaked some smaller things such as decreased movement when holding the ball for an easier time defending and rebinding the dash button for a better feel.

Another major improvement is the throwing system: Players can now hold in the Right Joystick to throw the ball, after some time the throw will have reached its maximum charge and will automatically be thrown by the player! Now players have the option to do short throws or long throws.

Our technical artist Akio has been busy making a script for his fellow artists. The script streamlines the export phase of Maya to Unreal and is proving to be an useful tool that saves a lot of time!

Akio has also been working on a Bouncing pad management system. This system is responsible for activating and deactivating bouncing pads depending on the current state of the game to help with overcoming the odds when they are stacked in the enemy's favor. Our programmer Arne has made the base system for this so that match information can be retrieved easily.

Improvements

• The player holding the ball will move slower, allowing other players to catch up and force them to use the passing mechanic.
• Dashing is now done with Left shoulder, which is more easily accessible.

Bug fixes

• Bug where the aiming arrow would appear when no button was pressed.
• Bug where players could cross the entire field with 1 dash.