Hello again! Welcome to our second devlog. Last week I said we were about to start development already. As it turns out, I’M A LIAR! We had one more week of prototyping left in the planning. Which is actually pretty good news! It allowed us to test our idea a little more while also fleshing out the art style. While last week’s post had a lot of content, this week we had to get through a little more paperwork to ensure smooth sailing in the future. This ate up a lot of our time budget but we still have cool stuff to talk about. First up this week, programming!

1. Programming & Gameplay

In last weeks build we had a basic implementation of the hook mechanic. You could pull enemies towards you while trying to hit a trap along the way. This week our coding team added the full range of hooking abilities to the prototype. The most important updates are the ability to pull yourself towards a wall and a decent aiming system. Players can now hold down the throw button to stand still and aim before throwing the hook. We also finetuned the pulling itself a bit. Instead of pulling enemies straight into your personal space you can now release them on command by pressing the hook button again.

Pushing enemies has been added to the toolbelt as well. Don’t want to spend time carefully aiming your hook or running to the other side of the hole in the floor? Just push your enemies into said hole! Easy, right? But beware, if the enemies are withing punching distance, the same might be true the other way around. 

2. Art

On the art side we spent a lot of time updating our art bible and figuring out what we exactly want the game to look like. This was definitely worth it since our new testament looks a lot better while also giving some clearer commandments to the art team. The main addition for this week is the UI which we are quite happy with.

During this process we also got a little further with the design of our logo which you can see on the banner of our game page. Since this week was a lot of paperwork we don’t really have more to show for now. Screenshotting our bible is only going to take away from next week’s surprise, right?

3. Conclusion

This week we should be done with prototyping, I promise this time! Working through all the paperwork was a little exhausting but spirits are still high and we are looking forward to the production stage. We really are happy with the progress we made on our prototype and art bible! Behind the scenes we also made a tech document describing our coding conventions and technical guidelines for the art, which was quite a lot of work but like I said earlier, this should assure our smooth sailing in the future. Next week we will start showing off our production assets and gameplay! We can’t wait to show you what we’ll come up with. See you next week!