Dev Update #3

I added new content this week: a couple of animations, six new rooms for the current level and a feature to improve the process of creating and testing levels in the game.

Player Animations: Charge & Drop Charge

Last week I mentioned that a new mechanic was added to the game: drop bigger loads of soul at once. This new addition required a couple of animations that were not initially planned and I made some sketches for the this week: charging animation and dropping the loaded charge.

I think that the most basic animations for the player are outlined, from now on the focus will be to test those animations within the game and see how can they be improved until they feel good.

Level Design: New Rooms

I designed six more rooms for the first area of the level, mostly to introduce a new mechanic: area to set player’s health to a specific amount. The first four rooms introduce the mechanic and developed it to naturally help the player get used to it and clearly understand how it works. The last new rooms are meant to be a bigger challenge, more complex puzzles and a combination with the previous mechanics.

Rooms still need to be connected so they start to make some sense in the game but now they can be individually tested, which is very helpful.

Editor Improvements

Currently there is a very primitive editor to create rooms and add game objects to them, it already has some good features but requires a lot of improvements. This week I added a tag to each room and the possibility to edit and display it on the editor, with this, it is possible to quickly visualize and identify rooms when editing a level, which can save a lot of time.

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For the next update, I will try to start putting things together so I can show and test some more complete gameplay, including the new animations, level design and previously implemented mechanics.

Feel free to leave any comments or feedback here or by email, I would really appreciate it.

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