Welcome back!

This week we did a lot of preproduction work. All our programmers poured their time into prototyping and experimenting with C# in Unity, while the artists worked on the artbible and some first visual demos. Besides that a lot of administrative work had to be done, like updating the tech doc, game design document and setting up a HacknPlan.

ArtBible

First priority on the artists' list was the artbible. This is a visual document that defines everything related to the art going forward, such as shape, mood, colors, inspiration, style, textures, ect. It also includes more tech minded guidelines, such as what pipeline and programs we're using. An artbible is there to assist the current (and potential new) artists to understand what direction we want the art to go and what is expected of them. If an artbible is handled correctly one could hypothetically make an entire new, unrelated game that has the exact same visual and aesthetic as the original artbible's game.

Art demos

Besides the artbible, some demos were made in order to explore and test which of our ideas work and which don't. We made a first test character in 3D to test the proportions and animations using Mixamoe. Some drafts were made for the UI, titlescreen, icons and what a potential level could look like using the Z-depth layer system.

Protoypes

Movement

Since last week a bunch more prototypes of mechanics have been written. First is the layer system; making the characters move left and right but additionally also in 3 different layers in z-depth. So far the prototype there has been successful. Some questions arose about whether we should be able to switch layer mid-jump, but we decided against it. Also, the exponential gravity bug from last week that made the character shoot of the stage if they accelerated too much has been fixed.

Playing this demo did made us reconsider whether or not the layer system is necessary or not. We decided to wait until the next meeting with our advisors to make a final decision on the matter.

Pick-up and Delivery

Next up was the pick-up and deliver system. This too was accomplished timely, making it so the player can pick up an item on the level surface, deliver it to a mailbox by standing in the collision box and get a point added to your score.

Package spawner

 Package spawner and the package gravity changes are working too. Because our plan is too eventually have them fall down with little parachutes and lose them mid-air, making them fall down full speed, we gave them custom gravity so we can have full control over their falling speed later in development. The spawner itself can spawn on the 3 layers and has a bounding box for x and y where they will spawn every t and d seconds.

In the end we combined all the prototypes into one, ready for a build and a round of playtesting.

Thanks for checking in, until next week!