BE: Prototype Updates

Final Concept

Last week, we fleshed out the core theme and mechanics of our game (which has yet to be titled). We’re continuing with a Learn to Fly-style game, where as you travel more distance, where your little old man can earn money/currency to upgrade his kite, wheelchair, and bling. You start off in the Florida retirement community and travel north through forests, cities, dusty highways, the plains, & area 51…

Whenever the player hits an obstacle or loses speed, they can go to the store in the area they ended up in to buy upgrades. Our end scene is still TBD.

Prototype 1

For this week, we aimed to complete the core movement mechanics and feel for the wheelchair, as well as implement most of the scenery art for the first level. We received a lot of feedback about the kite movement at the last two playtest nights. There were mixed opinions on the difficulty on the game; during the first playtest, some testers told us that it was too difficult to avoid the ground obstacles, whereas in the second one, after the programmers implemented the cloud obstacles, some players said it was too easy (even a little boring). Another area of feedback we got was the kite control. We received good reactions to the movement, but some people told us that the string still didn’t feel like a real kite string. Tommy implemented the non-rigid kite string and is currently working on a preliminary upgrade system.

In our last meeting we talked about how to approach speed. Tommy was working on using the kite to accelerate, but also suggested we make the road a slant. For now, we haven’t had a problem with motion sickness during playtests once we smoothed the horizontal movement, but that’s something to keep an eye on as we continue.

Art

For the retirement community, we have a variety of modeled houses and tileable lawns and sidewalks, as well as details like mailboxes and telephone poles. Sophia is currently still finishing up animations for the grandmas, but they will replace the red cube obstacles on the road soon. Thomas worked on the environment generation and corner sidewalk spawning, and implemented a few of the building and ground assets Sophia made for the prototype. Below is a test concept render of the houses and details.

…and this is what is currently implemented in the prototype. We spent a while fixing texturing and scale and still have yet to add atmospheric visuals.

Music

To add the feel of the 1970s, Harleigh is composing a soundtrack for the traveling wheelchair, as well as finding sound effects.

To do:

Fly a kite to test what feels most natural to the player.
Create the Michael’s store assets.
Complete the upgrade system.
Implement the remaining retirement community assets.
Create old man body asset for the wheelchair.
Implement sound.
Continue on to the next levels!