Day-7 Devlog

We're now 7 days into developing the game for the MVM2023 game jam. We've created a style and progressed it well with some concepts for allies, enemies, foreground, and background. There's been a great addition of scripts and mechanics both in design and programming that we think is putting the game on a great track to something cool.

This week we've managed to:

I hand you over to the disciplines to fill in what they want to showcase! ~ Ben

Art team!

The first draft of the Bow logo has been made. Looking forward to revisiting and possibly animating for the title screen of the game. Logos are pretty important to set the tone of the game. They say 'Don't judge a book by its cover' But first impressions are detrimental to a player choosing your game over others in a catalog. And the first thing a player would see would be the game logo.
This week we've been looking at character and character animations. Mainly trying to get a good starting point for the character spine. Without building a complicated build I have been trying to set up placeholders with key animations ready for devs to impliment. Key animations such as:

• Run
• Walk
• Jump
• Death
• Hit
• Aim
• Shoot

As you can see the assets being used in the animations are blocks that will be rendered up once we are ready to do so. With the animations in place, the dev team can look into placing them in the game and I can test and see what needs tweaking.  Design-wise we have been looking at the background with character dwellings. And made a start on basic enemies. So far we have a 'Slug' enemy that's been built and added. We have a tall plant monster that will be a starting enemy that will be introduced once the main character gets his bow weapon.

With the plant enemy, I've sketched out what he will look like when he's fully extended. Roaring/attacking. But I've also included a 'defeated' state' since this enemy will return. So we need a visual that the player will make a mental note of for when they come through the area next time.

The Slug enemy is pretty much done. And could do with looking at the colors. But at the moment I think that's a low priority. I think a lot of the enemy designs may be influenced by the environment. So once the game is further in development we can revisit character colors and design.

Shape wise I do like the simplicity of this little chap :D

And we have adorable background dwellings!

Design / Sound Guy!

At the start of the Jam, I had a look through some old story concepts I had sprawled across several unorganized notebooks and after deciphering the ancient hieroglyph that is my handwriting I presented the team with a few possibilities. We landed on "Bow". One of the key themes of Bow is that Things aren't always what they seem and the story lends itself really well to the Metroidvainia concept. Exploring a world and discovering its secrets will really help build the dark and mysterious world of Laboria.

Working with everyone to brainstorm ideas has been an amazing experience so far and it's been great to see everyone's enthusiasm for the concept and adding their unique flair to the game, I'm really excited to see how things progress. At this point, we have a rough area map that we will start to implement in the coming week as so many of the vital mechanics have been added already. Upgrades and abilities have been conceptualized and we have a really solid direction to be taking things. Super exciting.

A little bit about the story. Bow is a tale of a small Rabbitfolk named Hiro. In the village of Silver Burrow, on the first of every month at midnight a strange creature emerges from the clocktower and takes one of the villagers. This is how it has always been, however when Hiro's sister is taken by the beast, he takes it upon himself to follow in its trail deep into the mysterious world beyond the clocktower. Poor Hiro is going to find a lot more than he bargained for. On to the sound stuff!

Audio

The audio so far is coming along great. It's been a challenge creating music before having a visual to work with. Luckily we are all on the same page when it comes to the generally dark and melancholy vibe of the game. I started with creating background music for the Forest area and soon after created music for the Title Screen.

The goal here was to create a vulnerable natural/magic-sounding melody and back it with ominous antagonistic unnatural synth sounds. Hopefully working to create an uneasy and daunting atmosphere. 

Here's a peak a the Forest theme: Here
And the Title Screen theme: Here

It's been really interesting so far as this is the first game I've created music for. I will be working on creating sound effects from scratch for Hiro's movements next which is a little daunting but it should be fun figuring it out!

Dev

Hi everyone, Nick here. I was originally just going to be doing some testing, but got too excited about the idea of working on a game again, so I decided to pick up some dev work! Here's what I've done in the first week.

Pickups

The first challenge was to figure out how to get the player to interact with pickups, and add to a total.

I created an area around the player which will begin to pull the pickups closer to you when you're in range. With some help from Ben, we were able to get it working smoothly, it's a separate collision sphere attached to the player, which has its own script to pull the pickups closer. 

Here's how it looks in engine:

Here's how it works in game:

I also made a separate health power up, which has now been connected to Callum's health bar. 

Bow and Arrow

The other gameplay mechanic I have been working on is the bow and arrow. This took a while to figure out, but I managed to get the bow to rotate in the direction of the mouse cursor, and for an arrow to fire in the same direction when the mouse is clicked. There's still a few bugs I need to address, such as each arrow firing in the same direction, and it doesn't stick to the wall just yet, which is going to be an important game mechanic. We are also planning to have different types of arrows too, so I'll be looking into a way of differentiating them to allow for different effects. I'd also like to try out some particle systems too! 

Soon I'll be looking into replacing my programmer art with Sarah's spine files, and figuring out how to rotate the bones in spine the same way that the bow currently rotates, and add an animation for when the bow is pulled and released too. Hopefully  we can showcase that in the next Devlog!