Devlog 05 - Second Sprint Week

Hello world!

Welcome back to this weeks update of our game Jointed. We've officially finished the second week of our first production sprint and have a lot to cover, so let's get to it!

Art department

This week, Stan turned most of his focus towards creating the level and it's layout, making sure the players have the best experience possible when playing Jointed. Making a level for this type of scope was going to be hard, as we have little time for an entire side scroller level. 

To guarantee an entertaining level, we made sure to playtest and iterate a lot, making sure every jump is doable and every puzzle is interesting enough to complete / go through. Of course, making a level is not a linear process. There's a lot of switching between 2D sketches and the actual 3D blockout, as translating the ideas usually ends up a little different in a different medium. Besides that, as new obstacles and tweaks are constantly introduced, we'll have to adapt along the main mechanics of the game and constantly go back to changing the layout. 

This was the first idea of the level from last week. While the sketch looked interesting enough, there were several problems we encountered when translating all of this to 3D into Unity, as several puzzles were not fun to do and often resembled the same type of ideas.

That's why we iterated on every phase, ensuring every part of the level has it's own, original challenge. 

Of course, creating a level this big takes lots of time. Playtesting will be key for the next few weeks, as feedback will solve issues otherwise not brought to our attention.

Flor spent some time testing the shaders on some assets. As we've set out to establish a certain art style it's important to know how factors such as colours, shading, materials, post processing... will all have to melt together into the style that we're looking for. We free assets gracefully offered by internet heroes, we jumbled together a scene to do exactly that. 

Yet a lot more work has yet to be done for things look to way we would want them to.

Hanna made one of the two characters. For now its only Gretel, as we also wanted to have a model for other meshes due to the time-constraint. We tried to keep it cutesy and small, quite stylized and not too detailed. As detail will later come from the texture combined with the shader. See below the model with the shader applied thanks to Flor :)

 Besides that, she modelled two springy platforms in the form of mushrooms and the weighted platform, that is this giant leaf that drops when two players stand on it. 

Now she's working on a giant gingerbread rotating platform, and we're excited to show you by next weeks update!

Dev department

Elias added pulling to our playercontroller so that all our playeractions are now in the game, furthermore he looked into fixing our rope-platform interactions and made a oneway platform where players can pull eachother up onto the platform. He also added a placeholder sound effect to the jump and the sprint already.

Mathies fixed-up some problems with the platforms and created the implementation for the springyplatform. Furthermore he added the ability for the players to die and respawn at the correct respawn point. To test this implementation he also set part of the death-triggers and respawn points.

Bram spent time making our setup more modular. He created the player prefabs, allowing the level designers to work more efficiently and in a more streamlined manner. He also worked on the death triggers, enabling players to die and be teleported back to the previous checkpoint; eventually, this will also decrement a lives counter display in the game. Additionally, he finished up the breadcrumbs.