Hello guys,

Sprint 2 has begun. This means that we are slowly starting to complete our game mechanics and art.

Gameplay

This week consisted of fixing some bugs and changing up the movement. Now you press A to jump instead of using the joystick, this adds some more control. We also added the grappling mechanic. By pressing l1 you grapple towards a location, you can't do this on traps or boxes. Additionally, we added the player material changes depending on who joined and a simple start screen. These mechanics are still a bit buggy and not 100% complete. But we aim to get this all finished by next week. 

Art

The artists made a bunch of different things. They started to work on the HUD and start screen. For the main screen they used the same idea as our level, orange saturated foreground elements on a less saturated blue background. It makes it look clean and coherent with the rest of the game.

We also made some animations. To start off we made an idle animation, it slightly moves up and down instead of standing completely still. This makes the robot feel more alive. The second animation is the running animation, here we went for a more agile pose where he leans a bit forward and the "air friction" moves the antenna and shoulderpads up and down in a bobbing motion. We also made a jump animation, which is followed by a landing animation. During the jump the wheel moves downwards in the ground, this is due to the character going up and pushing itself off the wheel and then retracting it's arms, pulling the wheel up. For the landing animation we tried to make it seem as natural as possible by making the impact move each piece down differently time wise, for example with the grappling arm moving down a little longer due to not bumping into anything. The last animation is an idea for a funny animation that would happen when the player hasn't moved in a while. It does some pushups and uses it's third arm to grab the wheel and pull it back to itself.

What's next?

Next week we will try to remove some bugs and finish up some of the mechanics we were not able to complete this week. We'll also start working on the HUD. The artists will try to complete the level assets and provide the programmers with the correct HUD elements.