Welcome back! Production has ramped up to almost full speed and we are excited to show you where we’re at with our game. We spent some more time reorganizing our planning and then got to work on the game. The mechanics are coming along nicely and we will soon have enough props to decorate our levels. Let’s have a look, shall we?

Art

When you build levels you need a lot of props, to make them look nice. While each level is supposed to look different, they all share some of the basic construction pieces. Big props that fill a lot of space but also invite you to build on top of them. So that’s what I have been doing this week. I picked some big props from the list and made them in 3D. It took us a while to retrieve Bryan from this rabbit hole. I did expect all of this to go quite fast, but I overestimated myself a bit. I’m used to swatch-texturing from earlier projects, but using gradients is a much bigger diversion from this than expected. It did need some getting used to, but I’m quite happy with the results. I might however go back to this week’s props and add some more detail in the future. But that’s a worry for another week.

While I was making props the other artists focused on more pressing matters. Iben and Bryan have been working on the two most important characters of the game: the player and the most common enemy. While the original plan was to mainly use 3ds Max for our characters it rapidly became clear that Zbrush is actually pretty good for low poly things as well. While 3ds Max is nice and all, sculpting is a lot better for any organic looking thing you want to make. The results speak for themselves! This discovery, together with the swatch-texturing we use for characters, makes our character pipeline pretty fast. At least on the art side of things.

Programming & Gameplay

On the programming side we’re quickly making progress. The main mechanics of the game are almost in place. The hook is more bug free than last week and some traps are already working. Mice will already chase you around the map as well. Once all of these features are finished we can start building our levels since we need a working game in order to build a fun room the play in.

We have a basic pause menu working to make sure you can take a break, in case of heavy mice-induced stress. If you have a phobia for mice, better not play this one.  Jokes aside, the pause menu is useful when playing builds of the game because it allows us to test things way easier.

Conclusion

We had a productive week where we spent most of our time working on Robbin’ Hook instead of planning when we will work on Robbin’ Hook. The basic mechanics are taking shape, which means that we can start building our levels soon. Next week our characters should be done and we can start adding animations to said mechanics. Once we start building our levels you will get to see our vision for the game coming to life. We hope you are as excited as we are! See you next week!