Greetings fellow viking warriors and welcome to the second devlog of Rise to Valhalla!

The prototyping phase is coming to an end and our team has made numerous changes and choices trying to create an interesting game. Keep reading to get a peak of what’s happening behind the scenes!

Particles update

Since our group is heading down the HDRP render pipeline, the opportunity for a stronger particle system presented itself: VFX Graph in unity. This particle system allows for more particles at once as it calculates using the GPU. So loads of cool particles are now within our grasp thanks to the VFX graph system. Just a small sneak peak of the default particles provided by this system shows great potential.

Sound implementation

When looking into implementing sound, one of our artists turned up “knowing a guy”. Another student whose studies’ focus is centered around the design of video game music. In other words, the perfect opportunity to work together. Having contacted him, they seemed interested in participating in the project.

As soon as the green light is given for this game, we’ll start on looking deeper into having a cool background song for our game.

Concerning character movement mechanics

Different movement techniques were tested in order to find the one that would be best integrated with the rest of the game. An example of that is the “jump through platform from bottom” movement mechanic. The first implementation was deactivating the platform collider when the player character was approaching it from the bottom. The problem it caused was that if an enemy or any other object with a rigidbody was on the platform, it would fall down if the player tried to jump through.

So this was changed to make the player lose his physic collider when jumping (basically, when his y velocity was superior to 0). But of course this made the player invulnerable to hazards and able to jump out of the map. 

These two previous naive implementations led us to find the most optimal one for this situation, using layers. Now the platforms have the layer “Floor”. When jumping, the player has his layer set to “GoThroughPlatform” which is set to ignore the collisions with the floor layer. When the player y velocity is inferior or equal to 0, his layer is set back to “Default”.

Besides that a lot of tweaking and adjustments were made on the movement speed, jump force and gravity value in order to get smooth movements and a game feel that would satisfy everyone.

Axe throw prototype

A prototype for a core movement and enemy handling feature which consists of throwing an axe. The player activates the throwing state and sees the range of the attack. After a set time the player teleports/dashes to that location whether it's in the air, a wall or an enemy. The axe does aoe damage to the area it hits and if the location where the axe hits is an enemy they lose a certain amount of hitpoints on top of the aoe damage. This has a time based cooldown for now but a rage meter will be added to replace this later on.

Level design and HUD:

This week our team was also busy with the prototype of the game- level and mechanics mainly. First job was to design and sketch out the overall side look of the level so it would be easier to blockout in the engine. We created some silhouette thumbnails in order to see the general size and readability of the platforms. The added props, characters, etc also help to envision how it will look in the 3D software.

Another thing we were busy with was the design and explanation of the HUD. We started with some research and then wrote down what our game would need: Health bars, Axe aim, Score, Coins counter and some special icons for when you defeat enemies and get certain buffs like the Valkyrie wings for example. 

The valkyrie wings icon will pop up close to the player once it's picked up and then quickly go to the side of the screen for the duration of the buff.

Level implementation

As we now had some 2D designs for the level it was time to start implementing a few of them in our Unity project. Since Unity is completely new territory for us artists, we made a prototype in which we experimented translating the designs to a 3D environment with a simple, moody light setup. This required us researching the different Unity render pipelines of which we used the High Definition Render Pipeline for its volumetric lighting and fog as well as screen space global illumination. For now the level is mainly made up of basic shapes. This is what we ended up with for the prototype:

Next week:

Since most of our research is now done and most of the things have been thought out, we’re hoping to tell you guys next week that we’ve gone into production! We’ll have started to fully focus on developing our game, its mechanics and its assets. Exciting times ahead! 

That was it for now! Thanks for catching up! See you next week!

If you want to try it out: the newest zip underneath includes the tide, the older one doesn't.