Devlog 11/12/2020

Dylan

After last week's playtesting session, the team can finally say we have narrowed our design iterations. Based on polling and verbal critique on the new prototype, the new quest system was viewed favorably by the majority of playtesters, affirming that the players enjoyed the more linear direction the game was going. This led to a decision to leave it as is. Instead, the most amount of critique was still focused on the locomotion and overall feel of the game, specifically when it came to dough-shooting and the platforms. After careful consideration, we decided to further embrace the linearity of the game. This mostly came about when we realized that the respawning system totally ruined gameplay flow and was not as functional as we had thought it would be. Because of this, we shifted the design paradigm away from frequent respawning and instead had it so the player plays one life, which increments in "time" as they complete quests/go further in the main questline. To allow this mechanically, the design of limited dough that had to be re-gathered was scraped and was replaced with a reload system that automatically reloads whenever the player doesn't have full dough capacity. In tandem with a tweaked aim system, the platforms which usually spawn in the next life were replaced by the deployed dough becoming platforms after a couple of seconds. This way the player's strategic platforming is more engaging, active, and varied. Also an outline shader was implemented to up our visual fidelity along with a settings menu and updated level design/city layout.

For the next week, we will be implementing more content and replacing temporary art assets. Additionally, we will be focusing on the horizontal movement to see how it flows with a denser city, especially after adding a new mechanic where players can shoot dough into other dough in order to create a less bouncier platform that instead can launch the player forward.

Tariq

For my part this week I mainly focused on a couple more character models as well as texturing the existing ones. I was able to get all the current character and environmental models textured in Blender, utilizing the built-in texture paint instead of outsourcing to Photoshop or Gimp. The UV cutting and seaming was done at the time of modelling, but some of the models did need to be recut after I edited them a bit in order to reduce the poly count.

The focus for this next week will be to churn out more models and possibly animate the characters with a universal rig.

McKenna

I focused mainly on world religions and including them in side conversations. I did some preliminary research for what different world religions believe about the afterlife, and I'm gonna do some fact-checking to make sure it's all correct before adding it into the game. I'm also planning on getting some music made before the .exe is due for Alphafest on Monday.