Hello there! If you’re familiar with the project, welcome back. And otherwise, welcome. We’ve survived our first production sprint! Some tasks have been lost in the battlefield, some have been sent back to the waiting room but most of them have been completed and look ready to be under the spotlight. While we are really happy with the results of this sprint it has been a learning experience. What did we learn, you might ask? Mostly planning and organizing skills to be completely honest. Dividing, prioritizing, and tracking tasks will hopefully go a lot better next sprint. But enough with the chit-chat about the boring stuff, let’s have a look at the game itself. We managed to build a playable level, finish the basic game-loop and on top of this we think it’s fun to play. 

Art

We started this week by making sure all the artists are on the same page regarding the custom shaders and prop workflow. While messing around with this stuff we found some unfortunate side effects of using the current iteration of our cell shader. That meant it was time for me to put on my technical-artist coat again and find a way to have more correct colours and light intensity. While I was making sure things can look nice, Bryan spent some time actually making things look nice. Our dirty, greyboxed level was now made from brown cardboard boxes, books and bricks. This is a nice base to work from the coming sprint when we will devote time to decorating the level.

Aside from these big tasks, all the artists have been working on some smaller additions to the game as well. You might have noticed the pincushions in the image above. These aren’t the only traps we have been working on this week. Most of them are done, at least from the modelling & unwrapping part. Next to making some UI elements Iben has been working on the mouse-trap, which aside from being a complicated trap also needs the most rigging of probably any objects in our game. By next week, all our traps should be implemented. We also added some more props to the game and I got started on making some particle FX for the traps that absolutely need them. Which was a whole undertaking on it’s own. 

Of course all the assets that we made also need to be implemented, and that sometimes that means more code need to be adjusted and you definitely don’t want the artists writing c++ code. So let’s have a look at what our programmers have been up to this week.

Programming

When you play the demo, you will see the game is almost fully playable. The main improvement this week has been the addition of working AI for our first enemy type and a fully functioning health system. Enemies can now jump and will react to objects blocking their path. And be careful because enemies will jump towards you! Nicholas also spent some time catching all the bugs regarding the hook mechanic which makes the game play a lot smoother.

 In the last build of the game the player had health, but it was still hidden. Guessing what your current health was never good design, or on purpose. So this week Keanu added some UI elements that show you your health in the bottom left corner of the screen. No more guesswork from now on!

Conclusion

The first production sprint is a success in our books. We managed to make a good basis for Robbin’ Hook to expand on next week. We managed to build a decent first level and balance out the gameplay. You can verify all of this in the build we uploaded together with this devlog! For next sprint we’ll have another look at how we can prioritize our tasks a bit better so that we can hopefully show you the full extent of our ideas by the end of our production cycle. And I guess that’s all folks, see you next week!