Devblog Week 4: (08/11/2021)

Another week flew by, feels like yesterday since we updated you guys on how the game is coming along. It was a bit of a slower week with big projects being undertaken and a few have gone a little over time, but we can share what we've done so far.

We're delighted to say we've made some good progress and the game's really starting to come together, the first level has been designed and is currently being constructed.  This took a lot of work and this is version 4? of the design, depending on what you class as a "version". We wanted to ensure the player wouldn't get lost but didn't want a map system or a compass. After a lot of thinking we thought of having maps in the level showing where the player was like you would see at amusement parks with a "you are here" red dot. In the end however we wanted something more intuitive and thought some more. We refelcted on how players think and most of the time a player just wants to go forward, so why not take this literally, we then designed the llevel with the idea of so long as the player heads "forward" they will make it to the end of the level from any point on the level. It was far more time consuming than originally anticipated and had to be pushed into this week.

We have two steam constructs fully modelled and we started by thinking about why these constructs were made and how a steampunk society might have started to develop the equivalent of cars, this led to a mechanical carriage using a horse shape as an engine. We're super excited to make more constructs with this method of thinking and are pumped to see where it will take the design. Below is a construct that would have been used to replace horse and carriages and we wanted to ensure that was clear to the player and to the people in our games world. Currently the poly count is high and faces have not been shaved off yet but for the basic model we're really happy.

We've also modelled the player character and are going through the final few tweaks but we can share what we have so far, just refining the face mostly. But it occured to us we never showed the concept art so here it is! We wanted to make a more work oriented set of clothing that fit into the steampunk setting and had to think a lot about how the classic steampunk/victorian elements would blend into womens workwear and was an interesting challenge. We knew the clothing would be snug but practical and through some concept work ended with the two designs below. Each having it's own chibi version done alongside it.

So we've already started the modelling and over the next 2-3 days that will be fully refined and finished up, at least the polygons anyway. Currently her head is the main source of issues as not only is it a bit too baby like it's also very thin in a side profile.

Some code was done to spawn in enemies also and once we have the AI fully working it will allow us to easily create all sorts of unique combat encounters. This is put a little bit to the side though as we want to focus on other aspects through to completion before really diving into this and devoting a large portion of time to it.

Now as for what's ahead, we have a fairly hectic schedul for the next 5 weeks. In 3 weeks there's an important prototype to be displayed for the college course and we need to work at getting a lot of the aspects we don't have implemented implemented or hinted at alongside ensuring we have a good playable to show. 2 weeks after that we have a Vertical slice due and so we've spent a bit of time planning the best way to tackle the next 5 weeks. Scheduling is a necessary evil and we've had to grab the bulls by the horn and plan a long way ahead. But now that things are scheduled we hope that we can keep better focused and motivated in the next 5 weeks.