Hey ho everyone!

Not gonna lie, it's been rough. We didn't make the milestones for last week and our prototype was... uhh... underwhelming. The ghoul has really done a number on Alina, and they got a cool cast and everything. They're on their way to a speedy recovery and we're missing them more by the minute, but they are still involved in the process, helping out with testing and writing documents wherever they can.

 For this week we're determined to bounce back! 

There. Is. So. Much. Paperwork.

 We have finalized the project's Art Bible, along side the Tech Doc and the Game Design Document so hopefully planning the project now will go smoothly with all of this out of the way. We'll do our best to make our vision come to life, but sometimes after testing things out stuff will have to change and that's OK! At least we have a solid base to build on top of.

The artists have made a basic blockout of the level, so that the prototype has some interesting terrain players can chase each other around.

Our programmers have been restlessly coding away, implementing all of the mechanics our prototype needs to be convincing proof that, at its core, our game is FUN to play. 

Making the prototype playable

If you saw last weeks prototype you most certainly felt that it was not exactly playable, we the developers had to change this. We decided that creating a project from scratch would be best, an empty sheet to begin which would be easier for us to make playable. 

We organised our internal planning, task handling, and task distribution to make sure this time we'd ace it and land back on both feet ready to take the sprint into the official development of the full game. Starting with the game loop we furiously coded our core game loop so we had grounds to test on and work our way up from there. It took a lot of time and crunching to get that done as early as possible. We wanted to have a good template to start with before we implemented some of the more difficult, but oh so fun, features of the game that really give the game its own touch. The grab feature was the absolute worst feature to implement out of all of them. Somehow we had to share the movement forces of both characters which was harder than we thought initially. The state diagram for that feature was also something that started feeling more and more like spaghetti the more we worked on it. I'm happy to say that we got there though, it works! 

After that most of the features we thought would HAVE to be there were there so we started planning towards the features that we deemed optional, like the throwing of characters when you pick them up. Picking characters up was new to us so it required some reading of unity's API but soon enough we got it working indeed. Oh boy it seemed fun even when testing it out, we got really excited to share it with the team. We had planned a meet-up to play test the game ourselves to stress test local multiplayer and hope we'd find all the bugs in there whilst hoping it wouldn't be that many either. 

During our playtest where other people unfamiliar with the project happened to playtest it a bit too, initial feedback was rather positive so we got a confidence boost too. We found some bugs here and there some larger than others, and managed to fix most of those.

For those that are interested in playtesting the prototype, these are the controlls for the game. pausing is not an option yet and the game will restart itself after a session ends. Enjoy :)

 The end result we think really puts the feeling we aimed for with the game to light, next up is building it from a clean slate and make it look pretty, polish it and then hopefully get to publish it too. That's it for the programmers, see you all next week!