Hi everybody,

This week was our second week of prototyping,  it was a hard week but overall we're happy with the progress we made. 

Gameplay

We started off by improving our mechanics from last week. The extending arm/launching mechanic is more realistic, feels better to use and gives a better visual representation. We combined our extending arm with our box launch mechanic. Hitting a box with your arm will now give you control over the box so you can launch it in the desired direction, whilst hitting  a wall or ceiling will launch you towards that position.  We also created our first basic level, which would allow us  to test these mechanics and give us an idea how they would work in the actual game.

After we finished our main mechanics we moved on to controls and making the game multiplayer. This was a challenge, we faced some struggles because we were unfamiliar with the new Unity input system and the programmers had never made a multiplayer game before. This took more time than we would have wanted, resulting in us not being able to implement a stun mechanic. Although this was a stretch goal and a less important mechanic, it was something that we would have liked to finish this week. But we learned some valuable lessons from this experience. Instead of making mechanics for a  singleplayer game and converting it to a multiplayer game with new inputs, it is probably better to do it the other way around.

A small, unexpected struggle we faced was creating 2D mechanics for a 2.5D game. Whilst it sounds fairly easy in theory, in reality, it was a bit harder than we expected. But after this prototyping phase, we have a better idea on how to do this.

Artwork

This week we got a good first visualisation of our game. Last week we thought that our robot should have a humanoid form,  but we came to the realisation that this would give us some struggles with the implementation of the mechanic animations. At first we thought about completely removing the legs, to make a very simple character. But after iterating for a while, we had the great idea to use a wheel instead of legs. This is the best of both worlds, it gives the character some depth and makes the robot feel realistic whilst animating it would be easier compared to the normal legs. We still have some ideas for our future characters and there is still some work that can be done, but we are very happy with the result of our first character.

We also created some of our first assets, level and UI. We combined this together to make a great representation of what our game will look like. We experimented a lot with the colors and we are happy with the results, we think that the color combination works out well. 

To finish everything off, we made a start screen with some basic options that we want to provide to the player. The artists did a great job, it really feels like our game is starting to come alive now.

The future

After this week it is time to start working on the real stuff. We got our prototyping done, learned from our mistakes and we know what we want our game to be like. We hope that you guys are just as excited as we are.

Cya then!

-The Extendo-Brawl Team