As usual, I'll start with the biggest news. We have another addition to our team! We had another playtest and meeting session with our new writer.  Our game might not be story based, but I'm thankful to have someone to working on setting, characterization and world building. Not every player will pay attention to this on a party game. But for players who do care, it can be a make or break aspect.

I also decided what to try in my paper prototype for the class. As I briefly mentioned last week I'll focus on the betrayal aspect, and try to make players be more deceitful.  I also thought about how ill prototype the combat in paper format, but I won't describe it here as it would be difficult without the visual aid.

We also wrote and delivered our game doc over the weekend. It went smoothly. For the focus group aspect I conducted more playtests and gathered some more feedback.

On the actual prototype, we just had our first fight! I'll post a video with it. Francisco also and I also had a good talk about the feel of combat, and we did some debugging as well.

Since last week I added a health bar and also tweaked the timings of animations to be "snappier" with short startups. To achieve this I break up the animations I got from mixamo.com into 3 phases, startup, active and recovery. And then I can tweak the speed of each phase. This trick lets us have a lot more control over the feel of the game. Here is a screenshot of how our character animator controller is looking now.

That's it for this week. I was a bit busy with other projects, so I didn't work as much as I'd like too, but I'll try and make up for it during the holidays.

Thank you for reading and have a nice weekend!