It’s been a while! (Well, a few weeks I suppose?).
First and foremost, I hope everyone is doing alright. It is strange to fathom how long quarantine has been, and the adaptions that have had to be made to adjust to the current “normal”. There’s definitely a LOT going on right now in the world on top of that too…
In any case, I have been able to still make more progress on the project, along with the rest of the team. Making this update has been rather tricky as there has been a degree of both spoiler heavy development happening in the background, as well as a lot of “software engineering” going on in the background, which should in turn speed up some things on the programming side.
I have also brought another Programmer on board and have dedicated some time to showing them the code base and how things connect to each other.
Next, I have made some changes to the website! This includes changing up the character page, adding a couple of music tracks, as well as updating the current project progress.
One thing to note is that the Programming Progress may appear to have decreased. This is largely due to adding in some additional factors into the estimates and having to rethink some coding requirements while training the new programmer.
There have been some successful integrations I’ve started that will speed things up, such as a new behavior tree system. This newer one is much easier to work with than the previous one.
This will definitely help with being able to make reusable AI features, and also be make it easier to able to quickly test or modify behaviors, and be able to debug them visually.
Next, we’ve been doing a lot of development on plot elements and battle scenarios. Can’t really share the details of this yet, but as a summary, we’ve been pairing story elements with matching gameplay details, such as boss battles.
We typically start off with coming up with concepts of some potential moves that a character can perform in a specific area/phase, and contemplate whether a move will work out and what it would take to implement them.
(The above examples are basic move ideas performed by Camo)
(By Benny)
I also wanted to share a render of something we’ve been holding off on showing for a long time: Breeze’s “Cloud” form.
(By KeysaTrii)
As Breeze travels the world of Tropolis, he will gain forms that allow him to change up his abilities and moveset. In his Cloud form, he’ll be able to perform a variety of things using clouds! His design also follows a motif of a pretty familiar character in the cast ~
The form that most of you all have seen up until now has been Breeze’s Wind form.
(Thumbnails by Cindy)
Lastly, we’ve continued to resume thumbnailing more areas of the game. The above example of the Cloud Domain. These thumbnails help provide some initial ideas of what areas may look like thematically. The next step we’ll be doing is developing a couple of these thumbnails to get a better idea of the visual direction to take before proceeding to making level assets.
That’s about it for now! Hopefully the next update will contain a bit more on AI and form related stuff.