Devlog 03 - First Playtest

Hello world!
Welcome back to this weeks devlog of our game Jointed.

Art:

On the artistic side, we’ve wrapped up our Art Bible! This document serves as the foundation for the game’s overall look and feel, covering key aspects such as:

Realtime effects:

Since the rope will be an important part of the game, and is our main mechanic, we thought it deserved it's own page in our artbible. While we still have to throw ourselves into the unity particles system, we already have a good idea of how we're going to approach our rope (mainly consisting of some shader and particles magic). The ropes visuals will consist of both effects around the player, and the curse between the 2 players, representing the rope mechanic. 

Besides the rope, we'll also have some visual effects for the players movement like jumping and sprinting, creating little puffs and clouds. The checkpoints and breadcrumbs will also get their own original effects when picked up or passed by.

Camera Angle:

We applied the research of last weeks prototyping regarding the camera angle. Based on that, we decided to have no perspective in our level. Our main motivation for this was to stay true to the usual platformer, especially since the players will only be able to move left and right.

Composition:
Composition wise, we looked into other types of projects around the Internet, and decided that creating depth is the main focus of the composition. We will try to accomplish this by having the foreground really really dark and gloomy, and going lighter towards the background, fog and vegetation shapes also add to this effect. General idea is: the more to the background - the less detail, and the lighter.

Lighting:
By studying other games we have come up with our ways to handle lighting in our setting. We will have only one light that influences the shadows, whilst any additional lights only influence the color of other objects. As well, we will be working with volumetric fog the create depth in our scene. Considering out forest setting we can use the convenience of negative pockets in tree foliage to beam sunlight onto areas of interest. Objectives, puzzle clues and other interactables will be lit up by the sun prying through the leaves. Despite that we still want to achieve a certain 'gloomy' atmosphere over our level. By using dark fore- and background colours, even using perfect dark to indicate the cross section of our level, darkness will overall dominate the screen to achieve that gloomier atmosphere.

UI:
We want to still feel the story book, illustration vibe. This means that we decided to have all the buttons have this scratched paper shape. Also color wise, we remain close to the old books and parchment colors.

On top of the art bible, we dove into some level blockouts, as we now had a nicely working prototype that we could play around with and tweak parameters on. By next week, we'll dive into production and start creating props and modular meshes to accompany our level while keeping you guys updated on our jointed-adventure!

Dev:
We worked on the first prototype that contains a full level example to show how our game is gonna feel when it is released.

Input:
We spend some time on making the input system better, we previously had some compatibility issues with certain controllers but they should now be fixed!

Platforms:
We redid how the platforms work so that they are now more relaiable and stable to stand on. Since our rope is also simulated we fixed alot of bugs that the rope caused.

Player Movement:
We spend alot of time tweaking numbers to make the player controller feel better. We also added the bracing and pulling mecanic to our game. Now players can hold down on the ground so they don't move when the other player tries to swing below them for example.
We also make it so both players can pull the rope so it becomes shorter to they can help eachother to climb up.
CheckPoints:
We also added checkpoints to the game to temporarly save the progress that the players have made. Next we added a goal for the player to reach to finish the level. We also added hazards like for example a pit that the players can fall in and get teleported back.

Bracing:

Mathies ported the brace and pull mechanic to the other rope prototype. You can now launch the player by pulling back on the rope and letting go.  After that he added the mechanic into the final prototype. He also fixed some remaining bugs that were still in the prototype. For the rest it was just fine-tuning the final prototype together with the other programmers

The devs this week did alot testing and fine-tuning of the playermovement.

We hope to be back next week with more updates on our game!