Devlog 04 - First Sprint

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

Art:
Hanna busied herself with modelling the breadcrumbs, trying to keep the silhouette readable from a distance, as they are quite small on the screen. Also adding a big bevel, as that makes the model look less low poly. Besides that she looked into modelling the moving platforms, but talking back and forth with the team, it was undecided if they were gonna end up using those. Not much working on the project this week, as she also recovered from wisdom tooth removal, but she's excited to make up for that next coming weeks!

Although the early version of our fairy-tale shader already works when it comes to an object's own shadows, it has yet to work with other objects casting shadows upon it. Although not too challenging to implement for regular, plain shadows, considering we're working with custom shadow properties it has brought up a few difficulties. A shader can easily affect the object it is working on, but casting a shadow onto another object, and therefore influencing it's texturing information, is tad more difficult.

The basic implementation of the shadows are working, but getting our style to work with it has yet to be finalised. 

Flor is currently deep in the works to implement our stylisation into the shader.

As for this week, Stan spent his time diving into level design, starting with studying other platformers. Studying other games like trine and unravel, we got a better understanding of how linear levels in existing games were built up, what puzzles they had and how they kept things challenging. Studying this made it a lot easier to get creative within our own level, making puzzles coherent to our mechanics and bonded movement. After the studies came a 2D sketch. 2D sketches were a quick way to get a nice understanding of what we wanted to have in the level. To keep things easy, we divided our level into 3 major stages, all the while being original in their own way.

THE FIRST STAGE: INTRODUCTION

To ease into the level and mechanics of our game, we wanted the players to start off the jointed-adventure nice and easy, without any screaming at their teammate. Giving them these easy jumps, and hurdles, we introduce them to our breadcrumb system, respawning, anchoring, simple platforms and the importance of both timing and movement. 

THE SECOND STAGE: INTERMEDIATE

 Enter, the second stage. This is where things start to get tricky. Not only is the level more vertical, but players get to choose to go down different paths, potentially awaiting a bonus on the other side. Players get familiar with rotating, tilting and timed platforms, getting trickier and trickier along the way. If the players are still enjoying the game and haven't quit by now, we'd love to introduce the last stage: 

THE THIRD STAGE: ADVANCED  

Here's where tears will be rolling down cheeks. Players are required to work together, be creative and face their biggest fear: failure. Respawning will become a familiarity. Although this part needs more designing, we can't wait to translate this into engine and get playtesting!

Dev:
Bram worked on making our controller management work properly and in a clean way again. Making it so that we now have a join screen and players don't immediately get thrown into the game anymore. While also making sure that if the game we're to ever end and be restarted the controllers will still work and not get messed up again. Furthermore he also started work on our breadcrumb mechanic.

Mathies worked on the our brace/hold mechanic, while trying to fix the issues we still had with it during prototyping. (By doing this first we prevent getting into a time crunch with it later down the line even though we already knew it wasn't 100% correct yet)

Elias worked on implementing our base movement in a clean way again, so that we can have a clean base to work off for the rest of our more intricate movement. He also made a clean version of our rope  again since many mechanics rely on it to work properly or even be implemented in the first place

We hope to see you again next week, and we'll be back with more updates on our game!

Take care!