February 2024

Gameplay

The first task we accomplished this month was to fully implement our skill point system. Killing enemies rewards XP, acquiring enough XP rewards a skill point that can then be spend on various upgrades. These skill upgrades are permanent and transfer between levels. However, whenever the player encounters a save point they have the options to reset their upgrades and respend their points.

When grappling onto an enemy, if the player attacks right before impact, the player performs a critical hit. The critical hit does extra damage and guarantees that the enemy will drop a health pack.

Exploding barrels are scattered around the map. They can be set off by electrocuting, or hitting with your axe. These barrels deal a large amount of damage and huge knockback. Additionally they can be chained together with exploding barrels setting off other exploding barrels.

One of the most important things we worked on this month was the addition of the rage meter. You gain rage by damaging enemies, gaining even more when you kill them. Once you stop damaging enemies the rage meter starts decreasing. The higher your rage is, the faster you move, the more damage you deal and the less damage you take. Additionally, there is a post processing effect tied to rage that highlights enemies, focusing the player in on the combat.

The most vital aspect of development on any project is user testing. As a game developer it is one of your main duties to ensure that players understand, enjoy, and want to play your game. With this in mind, we devoted a great deal of time this month to having people play our game. From the feedback we received and the gameplay we saw we made a number of changes to improve the feel and engagement. 

Art

On top of all of the gameplay changes and additions, the art team has been hard at work replacing our temporary assets. We added a number of props including the new stationary turret model, the players grappling hook, plasma gun, baton, and jetpack.

Most excitingly we now have a fully rigged enemy model, pictured here with the gun and jetpack.

Finally we put together a test level fully furnished with art assets and gameplay

Next Steps

This month marks the completion of our first milestone. The game now has all essential functionality and we consider the gameplay to be fun and engaging. We have dedicated a lot of time to playtesting this last month, fixing bugs, and tailoring the gameplay to produce the desired experience for the player. This is a very exciting development for the team and with this milestone, we have created a few demo's to show off the current state of things.

Gameplay Demo

VFX Reel

Animation Reel

Moving forward, as we continue to produce art and animations to fill in the world, we plan on creating the actual content of the game. Currently we have just been using various demo and test levels. Our next step is to create the final levels for our full release as well as crafting the story of the game. We are extremely excited for the coming months and for everyone to see the final product.