Week 2: Tech Demo and Direction Updates

Hey all!

This weeks devlog is more of a conceptual update than last week. Last week, we prepared a game pitch and pitched it to a couple of industry developers, and received feedback based on our pitch. We received a lot of great feedback, ranging from things to focus on, keep in mind, and ideas to help iterate over our game concept.

Keeping feedback in mind, the main progress for this week was a change of direction. After receiving feedback on our pitch, our team all got together and discussed how we could iterate and improve over the concept of a puzzle game with powers associated with different keys. We came to a conclusion that what we had originally envisioned as a puzzle game with action elements, might work better as an action game.

There are a couple of reasons we decided to pivot to an action game, but it mainly boils down to the reliance on level design. One main appeal of puzzle games is making the player feel smart after solving a difficult puzzle. If we chose to go down the pure puzzle route, how fun our game was would rely mostly on our level designing skills. However, in an action game the player can still have fun regardless of our choice of mechanics, because as the genre implies there is always action happening on the screen (whether that be combat or dodging or something else). That being said we still believe our idea would work as a puzzle game, but we've decided to focus on action for now since we think it would result in a just as, if not more fun end result.

After finalizing our pivot, we brainstormed over ideas for mechanics that we wanted to implement for this tech proof of concept. Everyone came up with their own ideas regarding what mechanic would be cool (that is, if I pressed one of the WASD buttons a lot, what should I be able to do?) Ideas ranged from basic attacks to blowing stuff up around you displacing enemies with a riot shield, but they generally focused around combat.

For this tech demo, we decided to implement a simple attack mechanic, where the player cannot attack all the time, but can attack if they have enough vertical charge. The player charges a gauge in the positive direction if moving with w, and in the negative direction if moving with s (and similarly applies to a and d, where d is positive). These gauges are separate since the keys are on separate axes, and will allow the player to use some ability after they reach a certain charge. For this demo, we chose a front melee attack as our W key ability. We haven't fully decided on the abilities in the other directions yet, but we wanted to focusing on seeing if one mechanic is fun before adding others. 

All of this can be seen in the demo video attached, where Rocco, one of our team members describes a bit more about what our tech demo has to offer. In case you don't want to download it, I believe the drive link below should allow you to watch it after the video is processed.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13klCuIklPUbWJWwn-WuGYsYNc77ehlLy/view?usp=shari...

Just to add on to Rocco's commentary in the video, as of right now the player can use their W special ability as long as their vertical meter is positive. It consumes 1 charge per attack, and caps at 3.0 (and -3.0). The player may attack when they have less than 1 charge (e.g. 0.5 vertical charge), but they will be stunned for 1 - current charge seconds afterwards. In order to use the special ability, the player must press the U key while holding W. This is something we will change for the future, since it will mostly be a controller based game.

Also quick controls update:

WASD/Arrow keys: Movement

Holding W then press U key: W special ability

(no jumping anymore)

Also, just as an update on the art and music sides of things, our theme is currently the same as what it was in the pitch, which is a techno-y sci-fi aesthetic that doesn't take itself too seriously. We now have models for the robot as well as some graphics for the UI, but the graphics are not yet implemented in game. On the music side we decided to focus on getting sound effects done for this week, since we thought it would be harder to develop ambient and background music without any code working.

One last thing, we've decided to upload a build for this week just to keep track of progress. We're aware the important builds are outlined in the schedule but it's also nice to track progress on a weekly basis (in build form).