Countdown to Alpha

Hello, everyone! This is Larry, and I'm here to go over the work my team has done on Space for Sweets this week. To start with, my own work was stuff like...This! And...This! And even...This! 

A lot of my time this week was devoted to implementing gameplay mechanics into our main level, which meant I put down a lot of cops, dogs, and cameras in order to make puzzles using the layout that the artists had made over the previous weeks. I also added in an interactable that distracts enemies and a throwable object that can be used to distract enemies. This was all for the purpose of simply applying the mechanics already in the game into  practice, seeing how well they could be fitting into an environment we want to use as a level. Both the level itself and the challenges/puzzles within are subject to change as we iterate and improve upon both, but I feel like I was pretty successful in getting the basic mechanics to work in preparation for making the level as good as can be.

On the other side of programming, Angel took on the work of designing a shader that causes any item the player can interact with to be outlined when the player is nearby! You can see it in action with this here switch.

This is meant to help guide the player's attention towards any interactable they get near, whether it's a generic switch or some object that can be picked up and thrown!

On top of this, Angel also prepared a neat UI display that pops up whenever the player gets a sweet! These are meant to add a little flavor to the experience while also ensuring the player knows when they get a collectible (as collecting enough sweets is how the player wins the game). And while the player cannot move while the message is on-screen, every collectible is placed in a location where the player is guaranteed to be safe from enemies, so they can read the funny messages that we come up with in peace!

Lastly, Angel coded in a camera enemy. Cameras operate like police officers, where the player is meant to stay out of their cone of vision, but if the player gets seen by a camera, they aren't instantly forced to go back to their last checkpoints. No one believes alien footage where you don't get a clear view of the alien, after all. Cameras only make the player respawn if the player stays in their vision for over a second. This duration may change, but I feel like they offer a unique challenge as an enemy that the player cannot distract whatsoever, instead having to take advantage of whatever blindspots the camera has.

From our modeller, Robert, we received this ferocious model of the dog enemy...

An intimidating model of the camera...

The police station that was shown off in the level earlier!

As well as a bench and the switch model that you saw outlined earlier. He also created a night-time skybox for the level!

From our texture artist, Elizabeth, she updated several existing textures for various buildings with the goal of making the game's visual style more consistent. The bakery, shown earlier, was one such target of this texture change. Another change she made was adding variants of textures for the regular buildings that are scattered around the level.

She was also responsible for texturing the police station that was shown off earlier, as well as importing the new buildings into the level and keeping all the models up to date. As the person who set out the foundation for much of my work last week, I'm pretty grateful that she put together a fairly nice level to slot in all the enemies and mechanics.

Lastly, there's our animator, Jay, who prepared rigs for the dog and camera models. He also completed animations for the cops, which I implemented to the game. You can see those animations in action in this video!

He also prepared several sound effects, such as a jumping sound for the player character, a sound for the player throwing items, a clanking sound for when items hit the ground, police sirens indicating the presence of cops, and dog barking sounds indicating the presence of territorial canines. 

That sums up our work for this week. With the mechanics implemented into the main level, all the remains is to continue iterating and refining what we have to make the best game possible! Please keep your radars tuned in for future updates.