We are in the last week of our first production sprint and are finishing up most of our tasks that were planned.
Not all of them will be done since we had to revisit some features that were "finished" since they ended up not being up to our standards and some tasks took longer than expected.

• Rotation

One of the features that we revisited was our rotation behaviour. We had 2 main problems: it was not very clear if you were looking at your opponent and the handling of the player's rotation felt odd.  

To tackle the first problem we tried 2 new "features". We implemeted a direction arrow that would glow whenever you are looking at one of the other team's players, which gives you more visual feedback to help you determine if you're looking at him or not. However this did not work well with the fast-paced gameplay so we decided to scrap it.
Dynamic shadows were not enabled yet in our game, so we changed that. These shadows help to give a better sense of perspective to the player, this helped solve our first issue.

To smoothen our rotation  we now lerp our rotation, which already feels more natural. We also tried 2 different rotation methods.
Method 1 is build on the rotation we already had, the character still rotates based on your movement direction but you can change the rotation with your right joystick, so you are able to aim at a different direction than you're moving in,  whenever you need it. 

Method 2 is completely different, your character always looks at a point on the other side of the playing field, this point can be moved up and down with your right joystick, So when you move around, you will always look at the same point unless you move it.

We have not yet decided for which method we will go since we are still gathering feedback, for now both will be implemented in our game and you will have the possibility to switch between them.

• Level

We have changed the colors of our level so it is more in line of how we want it to look. We also started adding more props to the level so it feels less empty and we also changed the island so it is more in line with our industrial theme.
The shops are added too, but they are not functional yet.

• Conveyor Belt

We have finished added a big part of the functionality of the conveyorbelt. It can now switch position when needed in a smooth, seamless way.
The conveyorbelt is made out of a dynamic spline mesh which allows us to move and place the conveyor easily.
It was hard to setup in C++ since Unreal Engine 4 does not have a lot of documentation on this subject but we managed to get it working in the end.
The conveyor belt has no functionality ingame yet, since the shop is not finished because we had to put more hours into the rotation of our character.

• Effects

We created three new effects that are ready to be added to the game. We created an affect for whenever the ball bounces, it leaves behind little smoke particles. 
We also made an effect for the ice ball, each time a player would get hit by an ice ball, it will leave behind some snow particles together with more solid ice pieces.
Finally we created a footsteps effect for the player, the color of the footsteps depends on the color of the player.