Hello everyone,

Last week we basically announced our idea and what we want to make, this week, its going to be a bit more of a run down of the systems and art decisions we are making.

ART

- We decided on a handpainted look with gradients, and for the character and items we will be using a little bit more detailed painted style, to really make them pop off the screen while you are playing. We also already tested this out with one of the items that will get thrown at the player.

- For the UI we also already have some ideas, with enough of a handpainted look to fit in nicely with the game, but enough clearity for the player to quickly notice how much health he has, which buffs or debuffs are active, and a new concept for a drunk meter!

- Tested out the outline for interactables in the game, and its looking very promising.

- Tested out if Mixamo would take characters without limbs like Rayman, because that was one of our earlier ideas for the characters.

PROGRAMMING

On the programming side, we stengthened our decision to work with unity as engine for our game. With that in mind we started playing around with camera set-up (clamped to the player, free area, smooth follow), movement mechanics (speed, direction, smoothing and drag) as well as how would we takle attack sequence for our enemy. We don't want the attacks/throw patternsa to be too repetitive and static but too much randomnes would prevent players from learning and mastering the game.

PROTOTYPE

Our first prototype will include the following things:

- First look at how the perspective will turn out with placeholder assets for the characters

- Our first throwable item!

- Our first design for the UI

QUESTIONS

What perspective/environment layout are we gonna use? 

- So after a lot of discussion we decided that to get the best out of the art and the idea of the game, that it would be more dynamic if we actually used the 3D aspect a lil bit more, but with a spin to it, we decided that the more rounded idea would be the most dynamic, with the camera scrolling with the player in an arc.

How are we gonna control the randomness of the attacks?
- So Kiran has made a very cool sequencing tool for the order of attacks that we want to create, we can make multiple and maybe give them conditions too, for example, if you are playing for a certain amount of time, this attack sequence will be "unlocked".

Which art style, paper mario or full 3D?
- After trying out the paper Mario style and developing the idea for the game a bit further we came to the conclusion that a full 3D environment with full 3D characters would fit the more dynamic approach to the gameplay that we thought up innitially.

How are we gonna rig/make the animations?
- After using some quick Zremeshed blockouts from Zbrush and putting them into mixamo, trying out different animations we already liked the result a lot and it wont take as much time as rigging, skinning and animating 2 characters would've taken, so it was an obvious desicion to go with Mixamo.

NEXT WEEK

We will be going in to production, so next week will be the first update after production has started.

So think about, more art, more gameplay!

From the whole team: See you soon! \[T]/