Another week, another devlog! Hello there once again guys! We hope you've all had a lovely past week! As for us, well....

Last week we said we were hoping to tell you guys that we'd have gone in production now and guess what, we did! We got the greenlight! Our viking ship has set sail! Skoll to that! 

This means we can continue with our concept and fully start developing our game until the deadline of May 21st . We will do this in 3 work sprints of which the 1st sprint has just started. This sprint will consist of 3 weeks of constant work and hopefully end with a nice first version of our game with the most important mechanics, props and characters. 

We're so excited about this and we're hoping to do you guys proud and create a nice experience for you!

Allow us to catch you up on what we've been doing this past week: 

Designing the platforms

Since our game’s purpose is to get out of Hell, the artists decided the shape of the platforms is one of the more important tasks at hand. As our programmers are perfecting the auto-generation of the level, the artists have to figure out the size and reusability of the platforms. The first designs, as seen below, show a clear pattern of how we will work with a grid system to properly create the platforms’ sizes and functionality.

First we made separete versions devided by size and then we tested them if they fit together as modular pices. In the end we added some props to have the full silhouette feeling.

Here are our main inspirations and how we decided to tackle the creation of our platforms: 

The fresnel shader

With the finalization of our artbible came one of the first steps for character creation: the outline around our characters. We wanted both the player and the enemies have themselves distinguished from the environment in which they would find themselves in. So we had to come up with a Fresnel shader to create an outline around our characters.

The first Steps of Sound

Our team recently met up with another student, who's focus is centered around the creation and design of video game music. After having informed him on our project he seemed very excited to join in on our project and try come up with a "serious mood" song to amplify the dangerous feeling of our game. Before meeting up, he posted a link to his soundcloud to get a sample of his work as a student. Needless to say, our team was really happy with how his work sounded. Check out his soundcloud here: Simon Lager Brink | Soundcloud

Code Cleanup

Concerning programming, we recreated a big portion of the code of the prototype from week two. Certain parts got cleaned up, so less hardcoding can be found. Not everything is jammed into the update but has been put into functions. Comments have been added to add longer explanation than a function name.

Axe throwing

The axe throwing has changed from the player sliding to the hit location to throwing an axe and teleporting to the location upon hit. To make aiming more user friendly, the player movement is drastically slowed down while aiming to create a slow motion effect.

Movement Behaviour

The basic character movement has been tweaked to get as smooth as possible and give the best feeling possible. It has been enriched this week with a wall jump. This part is currently in testing phase but mostly complete. 

Infinite level generation

The first draft of the scripts for the infinite level generation is ready and working. It is bound to evolve in the future as a lot of discussion took place between the programming and the art team in order to find the best way to generate an infinite procedural level while having a good and interesting level design to playthrough.

Where we go from here

As we have a couple of design blueprints now, by next week we'd love to have some of them translated in 3D by the artists and tried out in the level. Basically we want to have started replacing our blocks with some actual meshes that work with the infinite level generator! Apart from that our programmers will continue working their magic on the mechanics, enemies (mainly the valkyrie) as well as the infinite level generator. 

That was it again for now! We hope to see you guys again next week for another update! Take care!

Underneath you can find another version of our game! Feel free to test it out and let us know what you think! These are the controls: 

For keyboard its WASD for movement, SPACEBAR to jump and Left Mouse Button to teleport.