Hello,

Since last week there have been some exiting developments in our project. I'll start by covering the most important. We have an art student teaming up with us! The team up happened a few days ago but only today did we all get to schedule a call to play our prototype, brainstorm ideas and get to know each other. Alan, who should be joining this page shortly seems like a perfect fit for our project. We are however worried the project may require too much artistic effort for just one person.  A second artist on deck would definitely smooth things out. If that doesn’t happen I hope we can use smart solutions to alleviate the art work as much as we can. 

At this reunion we finally started to have a feel for the vibe of the game, which feels great! Alan already had some concept art prepared and having  a vibe in mind is really motivating for me.

At this time we have two deliverables coming up for our class. We are to work on a design document. It covers a few topics relating to the gameplay, target audience and even some marketing. We are still to write most of it down, but we have discussed and defined most of the topics we are to cover. When it comes to gameplay we have the last prototype to base ourselves and have already discussed some changes to it. As for some target study aspects of the document. I have spoken to some friends that I think are prime members of our target audience. They are in their twenties, like to hang out on discord with friends and play video games together. They play a lot of competitive games like Valorant and counter-strike but also like to buy and test smaller indie games to play together. I think I'll be basing the personas, play scenarios and competition on their tastes. This ties into the next topic: the focus group. Ever since the last prototype got finished I have been asking people to play, as of today twenty people have joined our playtest server and tested the game. My friends that belong to the target demographic we're also very excited about playing our prototypes in the future which will be a great help! The greatest lesson I have learned from this past 6 months into game dev is that nothing beats watching other people play your game and observe how they engage with it. So I'm very excited to have recruited some help.

The other deliverable coming up is a prototype of the core gameplay loop. Our teachers encourage this prototype to be in paper, so we can quickly test and discard ideas. I think I understand the value behind this methodology, but having tested the actual prototype with so many people at this point I feel it's a bit unnecessary. Nevertheless, I think I can use this experiment to try and bring more social deceit into the game. I have been asking people who play the game to fill out a form, and the response to the social deceit aspect of the game is a bit weaker than I would like.

The last thing to talk about this week is the implementation of the game itself. It is a bit getting ahead of schedule with the course's plans but since we have a prototype that want to rebuild to have a smoother architecture, and our project is quite ambitious I decided to start working on it already

The prototype is already working online. The characters can use a basic attack and dodge. The most interesting aspect so far is the new tiling system I worked on that allows to generate a room as seen above from a table with numbers corresponding to each tile. This is also a nice base to add some procedural elements to levels even if some aspects like overall shape can be designed by hand.

After playing around with this for a bit I realized how cumbersome and unwieldy it is to design a level with numbers only.  So I created a function to create the table from an image. This way I use aseprite, a pixel art oriented software to draw rooms that I can then import effortlessly. 

In fact the room you see above was actually generated with this image:

As we can see, it holds the same layout. The color white is used for walls, black for ground and blue for shorter walls. 
This little experiment makes me wonder if we should keep every tile rotated 45%  to go with the isometric look, ditch that idea in favor of not rotating at all, or using a mix for even more variety.  This approach could still be made better by generating a mesh instead of spawning a lot of prefabs in, I'll keep that in mind if I start thinking this approach is wasting too many resources.

That concludes this week's recap, it became quite a long post. The team and I are going to focus on the writing of the design document this weekend. Thankfully we have established most of it already, and it's just a matter of getting words on the page at this point.