WE HAVE A NAME FOR OUR GAME!! Sorry for the caps lock but it seemed necessary…please meet our next game, “Switch, Pit, Win!”. Belated happy holidays and a happy happy recap! It has been a busy time of the year with the holidays, but the team has managed to (relatively) keep our stuff together well enough to keep things moving. Hopefully we can start holding our promises of making these updates a bit more consistent and predictable, but alas the recap!

Mechanics

Now that most of the core gameplay mechanics have been implemented, we have been spending time on polishing those mechanics and thinking of how they work with all of the other systems in the game. With this comes new functionality for aiming as well as shooting that should make a fast paced game such as this feel much better than before.

In previous builds of the game, projectiles would physically travel through the level similar to a game like Battlefield. This may seem obvious, but this type of projectile is very different from McCree’s revolver from Overwatch, for example. Our new iteration of projectiles is more in line with McCree’s revolver, being a “Hit Scan” type of projectile rather than one affected by physics. This means that instead of traveling through the level, the projectile is deemed as either a hit or a miss depending on where the player is aiming at the exact moment that the trigger is pulled. This should make for a much faster paced and much more responsive feeling game.

Along with this new way of handling projectiles, we thought that the aiming system needed a bit of an overhaul as well. We previously locked the aiming at a few defined angles since aiming and moving happened on one joystick, and aiming seemed a bit difficult without a bit of assist. Although this seemed correct at first, our new approach for projectiles demanded a new way of handling aiming. Being locked to a few angles seemed bad because of how easily players can change direction, and being able to aim at a full 360 degrees seems to feel much better.

One final change was made to quicken the pace of the game, which was removing the button for reloading. Instead of having to press a button when in range of a recharger, you may now simply walk into range and start recharging instantly!

Art

We have continued shaping the game world with concepts and finally have a first logo iteration to show off! Along with this we have begun reshaping our first world platforms to more accurately match the world aesthetic, and created concepts for the round win screen and what switching into your opponent’s body might look like. These concepts should continue to shape the game world for you, and give you an idea of how and where you will be fighting. Check out this awesome art below:

Animation

Animations have been in progress as well as we continue to improve our previous animations, as well as ensure all character actions have an animation attributed to it. Animations that are more noticeable like the running animation have been iterated on quite a bit and are close to completion, where animations like the player damaged animation and primary fire animation are being iterated on more to ensure the movement is crisp an noticeable. Most of these animations were not previously implemented in the engine, but all animations currently created are now visible in game! See them in the engine at work below:

Along with all of these awesome assets which have been created and implemented in the past couple months, we are working on plenty more this month. If you are in the Southern Ohio area, check us out at the Ohio University Business of Games Summit on February 22nd! We will be showing our game for the FIRST TIME, and hope to have a playable demo which exemplifies a first pass of the full game. Until then, we are hard at work to ensure that the game feels good, and looks great. Until next time…

Bone out.

-Humongous Bone