Weekly Overview

Welcome again to our Dev-log!

We have reached the final week of the first Production sprint and we are happy to say that we have implemented a full gameplay loop.

The programmers have been working on some more obstacle logic, implementing the Goal Mechanic and adding some distinguishable colors to the players while the artists have been working on the character designs, environment and making block-out rooms to, ultimately, get a nice level.

So let's get into this week's specifics.

Art

Character

After some quick concepting for the grappling hook and finalizing the design of the player character, we began sculpting and modelling our little hamster. 

Environment

After last week's preparatory blackouts, the main level was put together, first in 2D ad then in 3D:

And to follow up, the programmed obstacles have been placed, granting a small playable taste of what the level is going to be!

And a little bit of an environment to tell a story wouldn't hurt:

What's next?

• Modelling main structure components
• Playtesting (to have some fun! But also to improve!)
• Substitute all block-out elements with models
• Modelling, modelling, modelling, modelling, modelling, mod...

Programming

Goal Mechanic

This week we managed to reach a full gameplay loop for our game by adding the Goal Mechanic. The goal mechanic somewhat works the same way as it did in the Prototyping phase. Each player has a separate score which is determined by the amount of deaths they have due to touching the death mechanic's substance OR not being able to keep up with the camera which automatically kills off the player at the bottom. Once a player finishes, their total score is calculated based on the position they finished in combined with their death amount. 

As soon as a player finishes, they are removed from the playing area and the camera automatically ignores them so that the focus lies on the remaining players in the level.

Once all players reach the end of the level, a score menu is shown on screen which shows all of the players' scores and then announces the winner. Each player's text score in this menu has the same color as the player avatar itself to be able to better distinguish what score belongs to who.

Randomized Player Colors

To be able to better distinguish the players from one another, we added randomized colors to the players. Right now this is still an early version of this feature so it isn't fully optimized yet. A random color is chosen at initialization for each player, but it doesn't take into account that multiple players might get the (somewhat) same color assigned to them. So players could still end up with the same colors assigned to them which can become confusing. This is something to be fixed in the next sprint by creating a list of fixed materials/colors. We will then assign the colors from this list to all the players instead of creating randomized, and possibly duplicate, colors. This way, each player will have a guaranteed unique color/material assigned to them

Turrets

This week we've also added turrets in the game. These little guys, shaped like cats, will do whatever it takes to keep you from passing them. They will shoot colored bouncy balls at you which can block you and your fellow players. Once in range, they will rotate towards their target and start shooting! In the next week of production, we also plan on making these balls grappleable which should make for a lot of fun gameplay!

What's next?

Next week we want to focus some more on actual player interactivity. We have been brainstorming some good ideas that we'd like to have in our game by the end of the next sprint, so it's pretty straightforward to start on adding interactive elements to our level next week. These elements will make it so that the players will have to interact with certain objects/entities to mess with each other (eg. grappling a lever to close a hatch behind you to block other players and forcing them to take a different route to the next room,..).

Another small thing that still needs to be added are dynamic grapple points. We want to be able to set moving obstacles as grapple points, because right now only static grapple points are supported for objects.

See you next week!