Game production starts now

Hello again, we have now entered the production step of our game development. That means that we took a step back from the prototypes in terms of content, but now we'll have a good design and a starting point for a project. After the last week's devlog, we started to actually work on the game and to bring our design to life. As previous weeks were only prototyping with dirty and quick code, we started a fresh project with almost fully C++ code. The goal is to have clean and easy to expand code ready once the project is finished, so we can easily add new features and power ups into the game.

What's new?

As we started the project from a clean slate, we decided to use Unreal's Gameplay Ability System (GAS) for the base of our game. GAS is a very powerful system which manages, for example, player attributes and abilities. We are using it to implement all player actions and power ups, from dashing to activating power ups.

GAS includes a tag system to manage all possible states, events, and statuses players might receive. This saves us a lot of development time, because we don't have to worry about developing a framework for abilities and wondering how to disable some activations while keeping the rest active.

Programming

As one of our programmers is still quite new to working with Unreal C++ the beginning of production includes lots of coordination and exchanging info and thoughts between developers. But we will make it work, don't you worry about that.

The first week of production resulted in basic player movement (walking and jumping), which also includes some coyote time when running of the platforms, and also groundwork for the shooting behavior. In case you're not sure what we mean with coyote time, allow me to explain it. With coyote time we grant the player a small grace window after falling/walking off a platform, during which the player can still trigger the jump ability.

We also did some work "behind the scenes" such as setting up player inputs, player death and player colors. And of course we can't forget the setup for GAS. One of the more challenging aspects was getting the level streaming to work automatically between rounds and dynamically stream in the next level without delays or loading screens.

Design and Art

Now that we are fully into the production stage, it's time to start finalizing our artistic choices and the different elements of the game.

One of the artist worked on the character design, and we can actually present the finalized version of it. At the moment we have just the 2D concept but he already started working on the 3D model. 

We had already clear in mind what shapes we wanted to use for this design, and despite it to be mainly round and "chibi", we didn't want the character to appear harmless. 

Here the design is presented with two different skins applied, but those could still change since the focus, apart from the aesthetic, has always to be readability. We want the characters to appear as clear as possible on the screen. 

Here you can find some of the steps that brought to the the final design as well.

The other artist worked more on the design of the levels. 

He defined a layout to start from and we now have a static spawn area for the parry pickup.

Apart from that he defined a bit more the design of the platforms and he started to work on the models.