Kandria
Getting ready to set up camp
We're making steady progress towards the vertical slice. There's still a lot of work left to be done, and it's always surprising to see just how much work and how much time each piece of work actually takes to execute. It's honestly making me a bit anxious, but I'm still optimistic that we can meet the deadline in two months!
Nick
This week was mostly design work for me, getting the camp area sketched and implemented. I also did some effects on the side though, since I was itching to get to those and needed some ways to ffflip my schedule up.
Anyway, I started out with drawing more detailed sketches of the main buildings in the camp and their interiors.
Then did a rough translation to pixels of the engineering building. I struggled a lot with that though and asked Fred to do a do-over. His revisions improved it massively! Finally I had to break things down and separate them into re-usable tiles so they could be put in-game, and add the extra data that's needed for the lighting (normals, absorption).
It's already looking pretty good, but needs some more polish and detail work. I also want to revise the general aesthetics of the buildings, at least for the two remaining ones. I played some Mirror's Edge Catalyst again to get some more inspiration, and I think I have an idea on the direction I want to take it now.
Making things look hyper-modern, and thus clean and pure to an obscene amount, but then mashing that up with the ruined and dilapidated looks of an apocalypse isn't easy, at least not for me! Anyway, hopefully we'll have more of the camp to show off in the monthly next week.
Finally, I implemented an efficient way to render grass that sways in the wind, and a sandstorm effect that we can use for mood, and more importantly, to gate off the far areas of the desert. Wouldn't want players to get lost in the endless dunes!
Tim
I've been meaning to dust off the pillars document I started in my first week, now we're clearer on the narrative touchstones and tones of the game, after doing the Steam page; I got this done, which will serve as a handy one-pager reference going forwards. One thing this threw up though, was that the plot outline I'd previously pitched was perhaps a little lite on mystery elements; I discussed some options with Nick, and we have some ideas on how to incorporate more of that “detective” aspect, which should feature prominently in act 2 onwards.
Back to the vertical slice though: We need a new character for the trader, who will arrive at the settlement from the underground tunnels with new goods to barter. I pitched a character, though I'll not reveal more at the moment, as we're still locking in who they are. Perhaps once we have some art done for them, we'll share their bio.
I've also been re-familiarising myself with the quest system, and the game build in general, which had lapsed after several documentation-only weeks. I've put in some groundwork for the first vertical slice quest, and will double down on that next week.
Fred
Felt different to mess with environments and looking forward to see how it translates in game. I have a tendency to add more details than the style of this game by default so I might need to remember to tone things down but it was fun to draw some derelict buildings, study the texture of broken glass and how to translate fine details like that accurately in pixel.
Summary
There's still a lot of work left to be done for the vertical slice, and a lot of it is currently in a kind of choke-point, where the work to be done takes a lot of time to complete without immediately showing progress in the game itself. This makes it a lot more taxing emotionally, since it seems like we're just spinning our wheels. Anyway, once we get past the stages of planning and drawing out the concepts and tiles, things should progress a lot quicker from there, since we can then focus on making levels and tuning things.
As mentioned, next week is going to be another big monthly update. See you there, and if there's anything you'd like to see in that update, or these mails in general, let me know!