Greetings and welcome to the third devlog of DISCOOL!

We have been working hard to make the first elements of our game. From visual concepts to our first technical builds of the game. We will be sharing these in the coming weeks.

So far, our first iterations on how our world will look like and what our characters might be are finished. We have discussed multiple ideas and made clear decisions in which direction we want the project to go in. These ideas are nicely presented in our art bible. Here, teammembers can find out which things to take into account when designing certain aspects of the game. The bible covers topics from characters to environments, from colours palettes to animation. We are very happy with the results so far and are looking forward to keep expanding the world.

Design questions we answered:

How will the animation for the caracters?

We chose to do the new 2D rigging in Unity.  We rig our characters in Unity and make animation in Unity as well. This adds flexibility for all memebers of the team. If we need a pose to be added everyone will be able to do that. Will there any complex animation, we can add that with a spritesheet.

Do we work in 3D or just 2D?

For this game we are going to work 2.5D. This means that the environment will be 3D while the characters are going to be sprites. Most focus lies on the characters and making them 2D makes it easier to make them appealing.

Does the movement work on the beat?

We tested this in a prototype unity project and Cem and Jeff found out that it wasn't fun at all. The main problem is that it takes way too much concentration to keep pressing the move button on the beat. The player already fights the enemy on the beat, it was just a layer too much.

How are we going to melt buildings with one material shader?

The system we have now for melting background element is by using a global coordinates as a mask.  We move the whole leven to the left and at a certain point the mask in the shader fadeds to a different texture. The camera doesn't really move, but everything moving creates the illusion of moving to the right.

Currently Implemented Mechanics:

1) Player can move around and activate lanes by standing on them

2) Enemies spawn on a random enemy and moves towards the player. You must defeat enemies by doing their unique combo correctly. Failing a combo will reset the combo, and you will have to restart doing them. You can only do the combos of enemies that are standing on your current active lane.

3) An audio manager was implemented, new song tracks or sound effects can be easily implemented. 

4) The heat bar of the player goes down every second, if you get hit by the enemies you lose heat drastically. You can also choose to hold down SPACE to consume some of your heat to move faster.

We're not going snowhere , see you next week !!!