Weekly Overview

Welcome again, fellow readers! Another week of hard work has gone by and progress has been made.

To sum up what we did this week:
- Bounciness Mechanic;
- Camera Behavior;
- Controller menu/ready'ing up;
- Camera Composition;
- Shader Research;
- 2D level blockouts;
- Environment Assets;
- Themed Obstacles.

So let's get into this week's dev-log.

Art

In engine texturing

Because models are going to be textured mainly with gradients, we decided to use a procedural custom shader to create gradients easily and smoothly to satisfy any need. 

Technical showcase:                                                                                                                                             

Model by Sakibe Van Soest: https://skfb.ly/6ZOLN

 Example showcase:       

Model by Sakibe Van Soest: https://skfb.ly/6ZOLN

Camera

The camera perspective has been decided! The camera will be slightly horizontally moveable and will follow players as they rise up the Tower. The field of view will be e set around 20° to get a very nice 2.5D feeling, without too much perspective distortion and a clear view of the action going on.

Tower's rooms

About the Tower! While the programmers are finishing the last touches for obstacles implementation, the art team has started working on the environment, rooms, and obstacles to define concepts and be ready for modeling.

Environment Assets

The hamster cage can’t be empty of course.

So this week we started concepting the environment assets to liven up the rooms.

Obstacles

Last week we designed the concepts for the obstacles, but they did not fit our theme yet. Here is an overview of what we have done so far:

Programming

What have the programmers done this week?

Controller menu screen

This week we focused on having a separate menu-screen for the players to load in by connecting their controller. In this menu-screen, the connected/disconnected controllers are detected and the list of players & controllers is updated accordingly.

Once a controller is connected, the player has the option to press the X button to ready-up. Once all connected controllers have readied-up, a timer starts counting down towards 0 after which the main game starts. The O button can be pressed to cancel readying-up, which in turn also cancels the active countdown.

Camera Behavior

The camera behaviour is not on point yet, but we have a solid working base so far which we can build further upon. At this time the camera has the following functionality:

- Smoothly follow all players, this works for any amount of players in game
- Zoom in and out based on position of the highest and lowest player
- Set a min and max zoom, the camera will stop zooming in and out based on these values

There is still some work to be done on the camera. The values of the zoom in and out will eventually need to be adjusted to fit the rooms of the level, making sure it doesn't zoom out too far. Once we start working on the death mechanic we will also add players being killed off when getting below the bounds of the camera when it's at its maximum zoom out.

Bouncing Mechanic

So far the basic version of the bouncing mechanic is fully implemented. Players bounce depending on the way they collide with the environment and the behavior works as intended. However, so far there is no input to control where the players bounce to, which is something which will be solved next week. The implemented input mechanic will be used to give the player more control where they bounce. 

The force at which the players bounce will also be something we will adjust once we have the main level blockout. What we have now will be easy to expand upon in the future with possibility of different bounceforces depending on the object hit by the player.

What's next?

Grappling Mechanic

By the end of next week, we want to have all core mechanics present in our post-weekly build. This includes the grappling mechanic, which we'll start working on during our next meeting together.

This mechanic will most likely see some changes compared to its prototype variant though:

- Different controls (all grappling features will be simplified to just 1 trigger to make the player learning curve less steep);

- Different range visualization (instead of just using a marker to highlight where the player is aiming at, we will render a dotted/transparent line which better visualizes the grapple-trajectory of the player, based on where they're aiming at).

Death Mechanic

Another prominent feature that needs to be added is the death mechanic. For this mechanic we already had the idea of having a 2D cat slowly crawling up, trying to snatch the hamsters. So we will have to discuss the artstyle used for this mechanic and then think about how we should go about implement the logic behind this mechanic.

Obstacles & Player Interactivity

Something that will definitely add to the gameplay experience, player interactivity to be concrete, will be the obstacles. The logic behind these shouldn't take too long  to implement, so these might also be another complete addition to have by next week.

We do still need to brainstorm about player interactivity in general. If we would implement certain mechanics that complement this domain, the co-op gameplay would automatically become much more enjoyable. Certain examples could be the grappling of certain objects which would, in turn, block other players or the collective use of a certain mechanic like a cannon that has to shoot players to the next room, but players can then grapple each other back down and so on.

See you next week!