Hello there again!
The past week has been one filled to the brim. We tested, wrote, drew, and tried to fix a couple of more technical issues we were encountering. However, we pushed through and are happy to show some results.

Paperwork!

Artbible

The last couple of days our artists have been hard at work completing the Artbible of our little project. We have added and reworked quite a few things after review and are now proud to say it is finished. We tried to cover everything from the shaders to the shape language while trying our best to convey the slightly more complex idea we had for telling a bit of a story with our environment. As we will only have 1 level to show in the end, we wanted to try to get as much in there as humanly possible. If we will succeed? Well, that is a different question. But we are confident that we will.

I'll now highlight a couple of things from our art bible to give you a bit of a feel for the style of our game.

The colour palettes have been decided upon and to no one's surprise: it is heavily '70s inspired. We wanted to go for a bright and saturated environment with colourful enemies that seem to fit right in but who have just enough of a difference to them that they don't completely blend in. Our main character the spy, on the other hand, has a monochrome and desaturated palette that stays within the blue range of possible colours. This will not only help them stand out amongst their environment but also helps bring a stark contrast between the human resistance and the Corporate Robots. All in all, it will be quite the brightly coloured game overall.

For the environment itself, we have decided to try to go for 3 separate phases that you walk through. You start off first in the "Stage" setting where everything is all rainbows and sunshine. The furniture and props are nicely rounded, the robots seem friendly and everything feels like a nice and cozy office space. Walking past these rooms, the spy will find themselves in the "Backstage" where they'll find it already to be a whole less nice. Although the furniture isn't too bland it is still strange to find bits and pieces of the objects the spy saw before, only now in the mids of assembly. Lastly, you'll have the "Reality" phase. All friendliness has dissipated and you are left with angry and aggressive-looking machinery. It is here that hopefully our spy and hacker duo find a way to stop this awful corporation.

As we described earlier, the game will be in an isometric perspective. The level itself shall be locked in place while the camera follows the player around as they explore. The foreground of the screen will be where the Hacker has all their stuff (the hacker HUD) while in the midground the playspace of the spy lives.  

Techdoc and GDD

Both the Techdoc and the Game Design Document are far from the most most fun things to make, however, they are some of the most crucial parts in the design of any game. This week we finished both up so we have a clear understanding of how to proceed. We determined many aspects of our game and how we want it to present itself.  Everything from measurements to naming conventions to the target audience has been neatly written down now, and man was that an adventure.

Now we aren't going to bore you with too much rattling about these bits of paperwork but we'll gladly tell you a bit about our target audience.

Our main target audience is experienced gamers aged 13+ who are interested in intense co-op action games. “Overcooked” or “Keep talking and nobody explodes” are the closest games in terms of feelings we want to evoke during gameplay. We want players to feel like they are always on the brink of failure and that the only key to success is precise and well-thought-out communication between them.

It's supposed to play mostly on the pleasure of Challenge (following LeBlanc's Taxonomy of Game Pleasures). The players should be challenged with finding a safe way throughout the level by trial and error as well as learning the mechanics. By utilizing said knowledge, they can steer clear of any obstacles and possibly even make the enemy turn in their favor. Not every part of the level might be as easy to solve at first glance, but with communication and some insight, the players should be able to clear the challenges and reach the end. In the end the game caters to achievers, as the main goal will always be reaching the end and leaving.

Final game prototype

For the most recent prototype, we implemented some basic hacker mechanics and UI. At this point you need a second player to properly test the prototype because the game is too hard to play alone. Besides the hacker mechanics we also made a fog of war system which will later hide and reveal enemies. We added working guards that will follow you and try to catch you when they see you. We have moving doors and detecting lasers and cameras which can be turned on or off. In later versions of the game we will add a timer to these "turn off" functions so the hacker has to turn off the mechanics again if they want to pass somewhere for the second time.

Gotta skitty, see you next week!