We are getting close to Beta! In this busy carnival week, we identified goals for Beta, and made some great progress.
Programming ⌨️
This week, we worked on developing a set of abilities for the parasites to use, based on a new mana system. The current planned abilities The parasites will be limited in their capacity to use their abilities, and the aim is to have environmental pickups spread across the map in order to disincentivize the parasites from simply pursuing the human player throughout the whole game.
Changes to the codebase included increasing the abstraction of the ability system, in order to have more reusable code components that interface with the UI and mana system. Displayed below is a screenshot of the mana system and current ability parameters visible within the editor – the aim is to make sure that the ability system allows us to rapidly prototype for balance by allowing us to fine tune cool downs, durations, and mana costs without having to significantly much around in the code.
Due to the hectic nature of the last week, progress was slower than anticipated. Looking ahead, the aim is to finish implementing these abilities alongside the camera changes from last week by Tuesday and, moving into the next week, integrate the ability system with the HUD in order to start displaying information to the users in a more visually appealing manner.
Audio 🎹
This week focused on finishing the music system used in our game. A triggerable ‘rush state’ music has been finished for when one of the players is nearing completion of all of their tasks. The rush state music stays in effect permanently after one player gets a certain number of tasks done, regardless of whether they currently control the human or not. When the player close to completion is in the human the music adapts to add a ticking clock sound to further heighten the sense of urgency that should be felt by all the players at this point.
Due to the transition into the rush state including an increase in tempo it was a bit difficult to make the beats line up well in FMOD. To solve this we separated the short 2 bar transition into its own audio file that triggers once before starting the rush loop. Our next challenge is creating a satisfying ending that can trigger from anywhere within the rush loop music. This is made especially difficult due to the music modulating through many different tonalities making it difficult to find a smooth harmonic transition that works from any point in the music. One possible solution to this would be to create multiple endings in different keys that can trigger depending on where in the loop the music currently is.
There has also been work done this week on UI sounds such as sounds for our new cool down systems as well as standard menu button press sounds.
Art 🖍
Level Design
This week my primary focus was finishing the level design and improving the final visual style for the environment.
New Rooms
Our level as of last week was very hard to navigate since every single corridor and intersection looked the exact same – I changed that this week by adding in 4 new rooms which should break up the monotony of the level and make it easier to memorize, navigate, and simply make the game more fun.
Our four rooms are:
- The Control Room
- The Lab
The lab will also serve as the new spawn point for all parasites, since they all broke out of the vials in the lab.
- The Power Room
- And finally a blank room that appears twice to bookend the other corners of the map
Props
I also built several props we will sprinkle around the map to give it more detail and easier to differentiate various areas.
Art Style
This week we modify the whole color code and art style, make it more sci-fi and more interesting, especially make characters more prominent. We also come up with a guideline for the art stuff to make sure all the new components will follow the same style.
Animation
We figured out possible animation for the characters, although they may not be added into our final version of game, I believe it could bring more interesting interaction for the players.
Character
We modified the human characters to make it match the style of the parasites, and since we reorganized our storyline, I differential the human character by adding some details on the character.
