Third Week of development! Alpha here we come

So the third week of development has come and passed. While we haven’t been quite successful reaching a full alpha stage, but we have all the basic features basically done, if not in a really playable state. My work has mostly be producer material. I started the week by setting up a meeting with myself and the lead designer to figure out some kinks in our design. My concern was that

1. We did not have a universal picture of how the game would look anymore

2. The way i had envisioned items and the changes we had made we’re not cutting it anymore.

So we remade the design. Items will no longer be consumables, in the sense that each time you use a grappling hook you will delete it from a supply of 99. Instead, items will be like perks, unlocked on the way.

New Item System! 🙂

Get an item once, use it forever.This is benefical in many ways. The main one being that if the player runs out of items, he will not be able to finish the level. This forces you either to punish a player when you do not want to or make all the puzzles possible to win with the deafult moveset, totally destroying the item based gameplay. This felt like bad design. Switching it to a perk like system also meant we have active control of what abilities a player has at what point, which eases level design.
We then spent some time making a standardized list of all the items that fit in. We narrowed it down to a list of 5 totally doable items, and some which will require extra features implementation. Not BIG features, but little ones. Collecting this data felt very vital to the understanding of the process.

Physical Asset list and rule board! Me likey.

Then i had the art team go into a general art design meeting. I gave them a set of tasks, some things to be mindful of (setting, perspective and console most importantly) and a suggested order of business. The full meeting took almost an entire day and involved all the artists, but i gave them the time and it really paid off. The artist constructed a physical asset list ( which i didn’t even ask for, but i really enjoyed to see!) and a rule board. All artists seems to have good understanding a common ground to work on.

I have also been doing some programming work this week. I finished the new terrain system using a single mesh. I also added support for a little blocker object. Basically level designers can put it over a tile and it will tell the tile it’s over that it’s impassible! Using these we can construct the levels before, and without coding knowledge, so hopefully our artists can double as level designers if need be. Using a temporary mesh constructed by our lead artist and the animation work done by a coder i constructed a little demo and prettied up the game to see how it looked. Almost looks like a game now. Almost 😉.

Next week i hope to get to full alpha stage. We are gonna start putting our backs into it. I am also moving this week, which is unfortunate, but hopefully i will have time for it all.

-J