I had hoped this week to be more productive, but I did spend a lot of time debugging and trying things and redoing stuff.  However, I'm happy with what I did manage to get done!

Saving System

I finally have a saving system! Right now you can save through the pause menu, I will later add specific save points and everything.

You can save and load your magic and how many light shards you have picked up, and you can continue your game if you save and close it. The system is not too complicated, though I would not be able to explain it to a great detail. The game requests the information of all the actors that have the saveable object interface, and it then stores it and loads it.

I need to add the ability to also save the place of the player in the world, and make sure the objects do not respawn when you continue playing, but besides that I'm happy I finally got to doing it.

(Almost) Final Dulce Model

I chose to do a simple character because I was sure it would not take me too long, but I keep coming back to fix some things. However!!! I think now it is 90% done. The rig is not perfect and unfortunately the ears do not move (I tried to add them to the skeleton but it was not working, I would have had to redo most of my work if I wanted to have them), but I'm finally pretty satisfied with what I have.

The textures are also mostly done. I wanted to see how it would look with some sort of embroidery in the robe, and I like it! It is not the final design, but the concept works very nicely.

I did start trying to rig a new model from scratch in Unreal, but it was very painful. Trying to start to weigh paint in Unreal also sucks. I can't zoom in with as much precision as I want. But fixing already existing weigh paint in Unreal is actually a cool thing you can do. After I had my animations, I went on to fix some things in the actual poses and that was nice -I did not have to go back and forth between Maya and Unreal after I had my base in Maya.

Jackalope Alphabet and Signs

When I was planning the whole game, I told myself I would not make a whole new alphabet for it.

And then I did.

It happened while I was doing the little drawings in Dulce's robes, and the symbols just came to me. I do not want to spend too much time on it, I will limit myself and it will be very basic, but I am having a lot of fun with this part. I hope to implement it more in the game.

Level Design

It is not going as well as I wish it was. Unreal has issues with the brush editing and it crashes every time I want to extrude, so I think I have to update the engine and hope for the best. Even then, if I was able to do it, my issue lays in the fact that I cannot figure out a nice layout for the levels. I restarted like five times the blockout in Unreal and now I'm back at doing it on my notebook. I hope I randomly get enlightened and I can get it done soon, because I need to start working on the actual assets.