Weekly Overview

Welcome, welcome!! 

We spun our wheel like the little hamsters we are and progress has been made:

- Character exploration
- Environment block-outs
- Neater grappling system
- Breaking away from grapple mechanic
- Obstacle logic
- Death mechanic
- Invincibility frames

So here's the dev-log for you, with all the little details.

Art

Character

This week we spent time finalizing the design of our little player characters.

Because the characters will be pretty small on the screen it will be important to easily see which one is yours. Here are some possible solutions:

We also weren’t entirely sure if we wanted the character to be in a hamster ball.  So we made more concepts on that:

Environment

Block-outs are starting to appear, so what's going on below?

The idea is simple: we want players to get accustomed little by little to all the gameplay elements, therefore we created the Tower to have increasing difficulty and complexity.

Starting simple:                                                  To go wilder:

       

The Tower will be based upon the mix match of some pre-made modular pieces, that will later get merged together to create a seamless vertical obstacles track to ascend toward freedom.

For a general idea of the aesthetic we are going for regarding tower shapes and placement in the environment:

Mock-up created with Models and textures by Maxime, Sakibe and @Sekar Arum:https://skfb.ly/6TpLK and @We3Do: https://skfb.ly/o68Hv

What's next?

• Block-out polishing (playtesting and proportions fixing)

• Level  decorating (some litter here, and some tubes there...)

• Texture dressing (let's apply some decorations to these plain colors, shall we? )

• Light set up (to create just the right atmosphere)

• Character picking and modeling (3D!)

Programming

Grappling Mechanic

The Grappling Mechanic was the most urgent movement mechanic to be implemented in the game during production, so we got right into getting that ready. The main mechanic is still mostly the same compared to the prototype version. The players are still able to grapple to the free environment, to target points, and to other players, but there are some changes though.

A more compact grapple

The first change is the input for the different grappling variations. In the prototype, you had to hold the left shoulder to lock onto target points and the right shoulder to lock onto other players. In this newer version of the grappling mechanic, the three different variants are all compacted into one button: the right trigger. The player has a sort of "laser-sight" trajectory which is rendered when there is no grappling input. This trajectory visualizes where the player would grapple onto. The grapple point is chosen based on where the player is looking towards. If no grapple points or other players are found in the direction the player is looking, then a valid grapple point on the free environment is looked for within a certain range.

Breaking away from a grapple

The second change counter-acts the previously present exploit of being able to piggyback onto another player all the way to the top of the tower: the ability to break another player's grapple onto you. If a player grapples onto you, you can mash the right face button (O-button on Ps4 & B-Button on Xbox) rapidly to break that player's grapple. As soon as you break another player's grapple, that player won't be able to grapple another player for a certain duration (cooldown effect).

Obstacle Logic

After the artists had modeled the obstacles, we had to implement the logic behind them again. This didn't really steer away from the obstacle logic in the prototype version of the game. The only real difference right now is that the bounce pads are actually bouncy now and all obstacles have a physics material applied to them so that the players can bounce against them properly.

Death Mechanic

The Death Mechanic works the same way as it did in the prototype with only one real change applied here. So the players still die when they come in contact with the death volume (which is to be replaced by an animated cat in the future). After a player dies, they respawn at the nearest, safe respawn point.

Additionally, players now die when they get below the camera frame. They're spawned at the nearest safe location inside the screen:

Invincibility Frames

The only real addition to the death mechanic is invincibility frames. This was added to prevent the player from constantly being able to die over and over again. As soon as a player dies, they start flickering for about 5 seconds before the invincibility effect wears off. Throughout this duration, the player can move inside of the death volume without dying.

What's next?

The mechanics we'll be focusing on for next week are the Goal Mechanic (the addition of a goal trigger, the scoring system, visualizing the scores on the main HUD & adding a separate score menu when all players have finished the level like in the prototype) and some more obstacle logic.

See you next week!