[Devlog]Production Sprint 1 Week 2

This week, artists were working mostly on getting the bulk of the concepts, main meshes and textures done. Our good octopus and snake both have a face now and will brighten up the build with their shiny colours!
We paid extra close attention to contrast the shapes between good and bad octo, while keeping the overall feel among all characters, including their colours, consistent and appealing. While the characters are still looking a bit rigid (space snake currently looks like a frozen stick!), we’re planning to get them rigged and animated in our 2nd Production Sprint so they will truly come to life.

On the dev side of things we introduced a few weaponized hamster balls which still need testing and of course polishing.

The first question we had as a team this week was

1)Should we implement some visual assistance for the throwing in the game?

Not using the throwing with a rigged model already deviates on how the grabbing and throwing will look in the final game, the main issue though right now and probably later is that aiming your throw in game right now is almost non existent.Introducing some kind of arrow below the player’s mesh will help a bit the with this issue.

Then the next most important topic that came was

2)How exactly should we handle the Snake’s behaviour to make it more interesting?
Right now the snake’s behaviour consists of flying into circles(right now it’s just rotating) , it’s sleeping in certain time intervals and it can’t be fed while sleeping.Can we add something more to this behaviour?More things affecting the snake or even maybe the snake pushing/throwing the players away when they are close by.

Another Topic that our team had to discuss was

3)Should we include the hamster boss right now and how should it affect gameplay?

Right now the hamster boss was meant to be an encounter that happens during a match’s time.The players will have to fight it otherwise it'll keep knocking out the players and disrupting their match.This behaviour seems a bit disrupting to the game’s flow and we were discussing if we can implement it in another way.This also means that we ll have to discuss a bit more about it and probably postpone it’s implementation for the second production sprint phase!

Finally,the last topic of this week that came on the table was

4)How can we make the environment in which the players are more interesting?

The placeholder environment we use right now is by no means indicative on how the final version will be like.A few ideas like having drifting asteroids and space debri floating around to spice it up came up.On the other hand we have to make sure that the players,balls and snake are distinguishable enough , so that they don’t get lost in the screen.

NEXT WEEK’S PLANSFor the next week we plan to introduce some basic ui elements to the game,more weaponized hamster balls and if possible introduce the team selection screen.On the art side of things we are going to focus on finishing our snake and good octopus models for good and start tackling other art tasks along the way!Work!Work!Work!