Hello there and welcome to a short end of week devlog for Dead Heat.

A lot has happened in the past couple of weeks.  We have been working on rigging our Sonja model up and moving her around her new 3D environment.  We also met up with Kieran from Cyclone Studios on Monday regarding Dead Heat being ported to the Nintendo Switch. We will be looking into the possibility further into next week, but it is looking likely that we will be adding the switch to our target platforms!

The apartment is nearing completion, and the backgrounds are looking really good!

The amount of detail in every shot is nearly triple what we could have achieved in 2D. The apartment is not yet 100% finished, we hope to have the apartment finalized within the week.

We used mixamo.com to quickly rig and animate Sonja's model. We rigged up an idle, walking and running animations for her. We initially used skinned animations which do not allow for root motion. We will return to the model and implement root motion once the areas are all complete. We should have been able to implement root motion this week.

On Thursday, we suffered a ransomware attack that locked out all of our project files. We are currently trying to get back as much as we can, but it does not look like we will be able to recover what progress we lost from that build. Luckily, we had a week old backup that we could use as a good jumping back point to add back in the assets that were lost. We needed to rebuild all of the areas and models. We will be taking extra precautions to ensure this never happens again.

A word of warning to any other devs reading this. Make sure to back up your work WEEKLY and to ensure the system you are developing on is up to date on protection. Do not make the same mistake I made.

We now have all the assets we lost here and backed up, but we lost time to rebuild. We will work hard to have all characters implemented into the demo by next week. We are looking out for temporary 3D character modelers who can create 5 low poly 3D characters for the project. We hope to find one soon.

We hope you will join us on next Sunday's devlog.

Thank you for reading, and have a happy Easter!