We’ve got a much clearer picture now of what our game actually is. We’ve finally tested it in its most recent and updated state, with all three powers, and two working enemies. Initial responses have been fairly positive, though we have gotten some fairly valuable feedback for how we need to retool and rebalance some of the powers.

First thing is that Absorb doesn’t feel powerful. It was designed to be this majestic ability where you turn your enemy’s strength against them, and the shockwave just doesn’t feel powerful enough. A lot of that is due to how hard it is to absorb any actual energy, as enemies tend to stay pretty near you when attacking. We’re going to fix that behavior so there is something of an attack animation, but we also are considering adding a mana bar, something we’d previously tried to avoid. It unites all three powers into one, and lets us have a consistent, universal pickup that the player is after. It’s a trope in a lot of games for a reason: it works.

The enemies themselves work pretty well too. One of the more exciting ones floats a lot of objects into the air, then flings them all at once towards the player. It’s a very slow and imposing enemy, and a sharp contrast to the other one, a fast moving melee enemy that slams themselves into the player as fast as possible. We’ve planned a third enemy, but that likely won’t be scoped in for this semester, which is a shame because it’s one of my favorites. This enemy damages you when you are looking at its face, and it only moves by teleporting. The best part is that it pulls the player’s camera slightly toward it, so they have to jump or dash quickly out of the way. It’s a very tricky behavior, and it will be really cool when it works, but it’s important to know what’s possible, even considering how scopey this game already is.

We’ve tried our hand at running through our level design pipeline, and we met a few hiccups along the way. My Unreal construction process is somewhat slow, and I ended up taking an entire weekend to build a small section of rooms, that Kai realized he had overscoped. To mitigate this, our new pipeline is a very small scale in three distinct parts, where I am responsible for preproduction, Kai builds the level, and Mike does a detail art pass. The cycles are only done on individual rooms as well, which means we can tell very quickly if the cycle will be a success on an individual run through it.

Overall, I’m confident we’re at a good place to move out of this stage. A lot of the steps in it are listed as theoretical, and plan based, and we’ve already taken a lot of the steps necessary to implement them. That should make moving on to Proof of Concept fairly simple, though now our biggest hurdle is content. I’ve spent some time designing ways to deliver the narrative, and played with spatialized audio, as we’re thinking of telling the story through leftover phone conversations, and floating, talking masks. We’ll see how well that goes though, since this week is my first pass at writing it out. It’s been a while since I’ve written dialogue, we’ll see how this goes.