Hi everyone!

We've  started the second production phase and we are well on our way to having a great final result! While we evaluated how the first production phase went, we came to a couple of conclusions regarding the mechanics of our game. 

First of all, the game lacked some depth. Our main mechanic is dashing, but we didn't have enough mechanics or features that used this to make dashing fun and interactive with the environment and players alike. That is why we came up with some new and fun pickups:

- a pickup which allows you to regenerate health, but when players dash into you, they regain health as well

- a pickup which creates a spiked bubble around you, which can kill players who come too close

- a pickup which creates a bubble around you, which causes players to bounce off of you if they dash into you

- a pickup which grants you immunity against all traps

- a pickup which affects you with a virus that you can transfer to other players. This virus disables the ability to dash

These pickups alone allow the players to use the dash mechanic for various reasons and they make them think about when and why they should use it.

Second, the level design felt too noisy. So this caused us to rethink the way we are making environment assets. From now on we are making them with less small details, and more clear shapes to make it clear to the player what he is seeing.

Our progress so far

Programming:

This week part of the work consist of integrating assets delivered by our artist into the software. This includes the death particle effect, that occurs on contact with trap surfaces, which is visual is pleasing to see. On effective death, we replaced the mesh with a death sprite to indicate a player death. An attempt was made to integrate the different animations into system. But unfortunately this will be only visible to the client the following weeks as this is not yet completed. First pickups have been integrated. The health pickup and the living trap have been added and will be randomly spawned at spawn points.

As previously, our team at certain times still struggles with the version control system perforce. One of the lesson learned from our mistakes, is that one should save it changes and then submit (and optionally close the Engine as some people recommended). Although this seems obvious, at times we forget about it.

Art:

More characters are in the making, as well as animations for running dashing and an idle stance. Animation is time consuming as mistakes are made often, but this allows us to learn how to work with the software and do it better every time. 

Pickups and effects were made as well.  A blood splatter effect and a dashing effect were made, next to a dead version of the characters and a dashing animation.

Environmental elements were adjusted to match the art bible requirements and to meet the feedback we received about the environment. Aside from this, more assets are being made to improve the variation and complexity of our level.

Our next steps

Our next steps are to make and implement all the above mentioned pickups, improve the design of our level, and in general, keep making our game more fun to play! Tweaking things is an essential part to this, and we will keep doing this until we find how this game is the most fun.

Thank you for reading!