We are at the end of the prototyping phase. We made our final prototypes and tested them if certain features work or not and if the overall game is fun to play. During this week, we were able to test the following features:

• Fortifications

In our game, players will be able to build fortifications that they buy from the shop, with a currency that is generated over time. This week we looked at how building those fortifications would be implemented into Unreal Engine 4. We were inspired by the implementation of Fornite's building mechanic, more specifically by the visual feedback that they give to the player, so we tried to mimic their concept, which worked pretty well, (not taking into account how many times Unreal Engine 4 crashed ).

• Improving ball interactions

Last week's prototype had some problems with the players interacting with the balls: players could get hit by their ball, the balls did not despawn and you could throw balls almost every single frame. This week we had a second look at our ball mechanics and with our new implementation, fixed some of the problems we were having. In this prototype, there will be 2 balls in the game, which players can pick up and throw at each other. The player that threw the ball can not get hit by it. 

• Character

We decided to use one model for all the players with a difference in the players' jersey colour.  The different colours are the 4 standard colours: blue, red, green and yellow. The character will be slightly hand painted.

• Animations

Last week we had a lot of problems trying to use Mixamo, the program was unable to auto rig our character, we tried avoiding the error by making the rig ourselves but this didn't fix our problem. We almost gave up using Mixamo and in our last desperate attempts, we decided to brute force our way through it and try to keep uploading it to Mixamo. This surprisingly worked after the third time. Now we can animate our character with the preset animations that are available.

• UI in Unreal

We also made some changes to the UI and tested how it would look like in Unreal Engine 4. Each player health is visible at the top of the screen and each teams gold is visible in the top corners of the window. A timer in the middle will show how much time is left before the game is ended automatically.