Vertical Slice Progress Update

• In the middle of last month, we sent out our Vertical Slice to a small handful of other game devs and consultants and gathered feedback from them. Feedback consisted of things we largely expected to hear and some overall positive comments such as, fun gameplay loop, feels good to play. Other things included certain systems feeling slightly off, which we already intended to fix in the near future.

• We did see a common thread of feedback that we thought was very important to address, so we are going to be reworking the scenario you play though to get you into the bulk of gameplay and design quicker. Currently, you play through a very rushed version of the first few hours of the game. We will be changing this so it’s more akin to playing in the middle of the game to simulate what the bulk of gameplay will feel like.

• The other important piece of feedback we recived was to raise the visual quality of the enviroments to near-final levels. While we currently lack an environment artist, we will be trying our best to bring the environmental quality up to the ideals we have planned for the final product.

Progress

• Zane has been organizing our external assets to prepare to visually polish the section of zone 1 and the home island that’s played in the VS.

• Jon has continued working on the battle system rework, finalizing setting up custom states, adding the ability to add custom behaviors to each state, and creating a playground for testing the mythren while editing them. This update to character editing should make creating mythren a bit less tedious and allow for more flexibility than the previous version.

• Jon also created some of the first animations for the Darkren Wisper; these little guys are your basic grunts and will be relatively easy to kill and have clear tells in their attacks but pose a challenge in large numbers.

• We’ve welcomed onboard a new animator, Robert! He’s been working on giving Raddapus’ animations a revisit and breathing extra life and character into them.

• Aidan has been working further on the movement dev tools by cleaning up the movement script and working with Zane to get our Cliff Fall system to work as intended. This system will make sure you can't walk or jump up cliffs to get to locations in a more cheesy manner.

• Drake experimented with a painting style for artwork this month, to try and unify his work with what is seen in-game! He also started working on simple 2D animations to help our animator take his ideas for attacks and then have them 3D animated this month!

Community

• After some deliberating, we decided to axe the Dev Log. While having a video format way to share more in-depth looks into the game and overall more footage sounds like a great idea, Zane is simply too tied up with working on other areas of the project to commit time like that to scripting, recording, editing and voice over.
• We do apologize for this. Hopefully we will be able to find some other fun ways to bring you more content in the future, and the increased time spent working on the game will be felt - both in the combat alpha towards the end of the year, and the gameplay you will experience in beta and final release!

See you next month on the 1st!