There’s very much a focus this week on just getting all our ducks in a row. There was a pretty heavy emphasis put on making sure that we pass greenlight, and even thought it’s mostly just a lot of planning docs, we’d rather not get held up any than the process already sort of has. The only thing I’ve really been tasked with in terms of greenlight requirements is completing the narrative doc, which also involves me really finalizing the Florida storyline. It feels like a lot more responsibility than it is. Empirical suffered a great deal from my indecision in terms of how its story would go, and a lot of that weird stress is sort of accompanying this. I don’t think the actual process will be particularly daunting though as the Empirical narrative needed to be very integrated into each part of the game and have a meaningful impact, while Frogs’ just has to make sense, motivate the player, and be kinda fun. It also is very isolated in terms of its individual events and their impact on the world. It’ll be nice to have a finished spine to be working from though.

I’ll also be touching Unity scripts for the first time in a while this week. There wasn’t much more for me to do towards greenlight, and one of the biggest things stopping us from building levels is not knowing what the players’ movement abilities are going to feel like. I’ve taken it upon myself to start prototyping them, so we’ll at least have a starting point to make levels with and test them ourselves. Dash is the first, and I’m not super worried, as it should just be an impulse in one direction. 8-directional dash will probably be harder, though Rob said the directional controller input is pretty easy to parse and use, so I’m not super worried. Wall Hop is going to be a little trickier. I remember hearing that we have a function for checking whether the player is touching the ground, so I imagine it’ll just be checking that, then whether they’ve jumped already, then whether they’re touching a surface. Tuning either of them is definitely going to be what I fill the rest of my allotted time with each of them with, but anything I make is obviously not going to play well because they have no animations.

Florida as world did get a lot more fleshed out and concrete as well. I sketched a few tiny areas for it, but the important part was establishing what the feeling of its levels was going to be. Florida doesn’t lend itself to verticality particularly well, and mostly features flat areas like beaches and suburbs. What I ultimately decided on was something sort of lane-based. The biggest challenges will be based on navigating to the correct level, and being careful to not become trapped between enemies or walls in the gaps between roofs and layers of boardwalk. The player will have access to the dash combo as well, which will allow them to dash through enemies if they do get trapped. A Florida boardwalk seemed like the best way to communicate as much of Florida as possible while still allowing for some variation and verticality.