Project 7: Breakout (Devlog #4)
/The past week has been spent working on getting the game ready for our week 10 presentation. We really wanted to make sure the vast majority, if not all, of our game mechanics are in the game for this presentation. This presentation is supposed to represent the alpha build of our game.
boost meter
One new feature added this week was our boost meter. Occasionally when defeating enemies a boost drop (red orb for now) will drop. Picking this drop up will start to fill up a red meter under the player's health. Once this meter the player can activate boost mode. While in boost mode the player will deal 2x melee damage and take less damage from enemy attacks.
Going into this presentation we wanted to make sure our game really spoke for itself; rather than us explaining alot of what was happening, like in our previous presentations. In order to accomplish this we implemented a dialogue system. The dialogue system allows us to explain what is going on in the game, provide the player with information and instructions, through our characters' conversations with each other.
in game Dialogue
The dialogue system is completely modular. It works using a conversation scriptable objects, that store all the dialogue in a that conversation and who says what. We then pass this conversation to our Dialogue Manager when we want that conversation to popup on screen. The Dialogue Manager stores the messages from the conversation in a queue and they are read out one at a time.
Along with the dialogue boxes. We also added in scripted story events. These are events that allow us to control when certain things happen in game. For example, we want Evolve's powers to change at specific points throughout the game. Our story events allow us to set it so certain things must be done before the trigger to change his power set is active. Another story event is a point in the level where the players become trapped and must fight off waves of enemies before continueing.
The past few weeks we also spent some time doing to motion capture for all our player and enemy animations. Using motion capture instead of hand animation all of our character animation will save our artists a ton of time and allows them to focus their time on other parts of the game.
The last major thing we wanted to do before our presentation is to actually get our character models and our animations in the game, instead of the placeholders we have been using up until now. With our actual characters and other art assets starting to be implemented, it is starting to look more and more like an actual game.
While the animations were touched up and applied to our characters, we also had some time to implement a few extra features that make the game feel a bit more polished. We added some things like button prompts when players are standing near interactable objects, a few basic sounds, and a new font for dialogue messages that better fits the comic book look we are going for.
Going forward we will be focused on implementing the rest of our character animations, as well as starting to bring in our level assets to replace our prototype level. We are also planning on refining combat mechanics and enemy AI so that it feels very responsive and fun. We also hope to start play testing the game near the end of June or beginning of July, anyone who is interested in testing the game and providing feedback should look for a post closer to the end of June with more details.