Its that time of the month again, our monthly recap! With one month already under our belt, the art style and features of our game have evolved to provide a more concrete example of what this game will be. Although we fell a bit short of our goal for the month, we made some positive progress that we would like to share with everyone. Without further ado, let’s jump into the recap!

Mechanics

During this sprint, the movement options for the player were expanded greatly to include crouching, wall jumping, fast falling, and even a damaging jump kick!

Early Jump Kick shown above without animations

Early Wall Jumping shown above also without animations

Along with dealing damage, the jump kick can also deflect incoming projectiles as a last line of defense. This will have to be tested to ensure it won’t be too overpowered, but we wanted a way for the player to skillfully avoid damage in ways other than simply hiding behind a wall. Of course this ability will come with a cooldown that we will have to tweak as well, but currently the kick is feeling pretty good. This is going to look AWESOME once we implement our real character with animations.

Apart from character functionality, we also have been experimenting with powerups, weapon recharging, and a way of displaying all of this information to the player. There is now a HUD surrounding each character showing lives and weapon charge, and we intend on expanding that to also show the current equipped powerup.

At the moment, we have early versions of a positive power-up (the jetpack) and a negative power-up (reverse controls). The idea is that positive power-ups enhance play and would be used while the player is controlling their own character, and that negative power-ups hinder play and would be used before a switch to make controlling the player’s character more difficult for their enemy.

Weapon recharge stations have been placed throughout the levels to balance play and drive players into certain locations on a map. After a player exhausts their charge, they will have to navigate to a recharge station and charge for 2 seconds before they can shoot again. Hopefully this will discourage players from being trigger happy, and go for more skilled and timely shots.

Art

In the art department, a world one background painting was completed to show the feel and look of the environment and show how the level may look. Along with developing concepts, some actual level assets were created for in game purposes such as the recharge station and the power up station. Currently theses two in game assets are not complete and are a quick representation of what these objects will look like, detailing and finalization of them will come later. Lastly, the laser art for both the platform and shot were created. As of now there are a lot a place-holder images in our prototype, but with the help of these our game will get closer and closer to what it should look like.

Final version of the world 1 environment promo image

Some early unshaded in-game assets

Level Design

The topic of scaling has been in the back of our minds since the start but we finally got it nailed. A level was created 3 times and scaled differently from small to medium to large. We all play-tested each size and concluded on the best size visually and technically for players. With this as a base, it should now be a lot easier to create properly sized assets and experiment more with level designs.

Animation

The character rig for the side view of the character has been completed, enabling us to start animating aiming and other actions which use the side view. Since Spine is being used as our animation software, we spent a good chunk of time figuring out the features that come with the Unity runtime. This should expand the possibilities of what we can do with interactivity and animation, particularly with aiming.

With our second recap in the books, we look towards the next month to make some progress and get to the point where we can show actual gameplay! Stay in the loop on our social media (linked at the bottom of the page) until then, or wait until July for the next in-depth recap. Until next time.

– Humongous Bone Games