Another week has passed and the game is truly coming together.  I'm ending this week on a positive note because I returned from a weekend away to find plenty of new art in my inbox! It's a pleasant treat for sure to find that while you were away your idea of a game was slowly transforming into a real life thing.  It's like ordering a burger and returning from the bathroom to see it already out in front of you.

Capsule Art

As always I was to start this week off by talking about art because as a programmer this is the most magical piece of the game to me.  I started this devlog series once I secured an artist specifically because I wanted to share their progress with the world.  Games are a visual medium first and foremost so let's talk about what I had arrive in my mailbox.

Starting with Bruno, I found that he has made some amazing progress on the capsule art for the game.  Up until now we've had a little back and forth about the layout of things and most of it has been in sketches so I couldn't really see the full picture.  But when I returned from a weekend away, I found THIS waiting for me and I was so excited.

I think what excited me most about this picture is just seeing the character truly come to life.  Up until now I've been working with AI generated art, which, while good, does not have the same impact as really taking the character we designed and making them real.  Specifically I really like how the main character turned out, and the framing of both weapons really played to the game's unique identity and core mechanics.  To add to it, I love how enemies from the first level are all over the battlefield with some of them hiding cleverly in the background.  I think that's super cool because it gives the piece a Where's Waldo element and makes it exciting to find characters you've fought lurking in the shadows!

Game Art

While Bruno has been making the marketing materials for the game Ref has continued trucking along and created two more elite enemies for the second level.  Meet heretic one and heretic two! 

What I really like about these guys is that they play very well into the the thematic biome of the second level. At this point we've swapped the Blues/Blacks of the first level with the red/silver look of the second, while maintaining the purple corruption in between.  What's more, these two have a much more human feel to them since they both are possessed heretics rather than reanimated corpses.  I'm really excited to have players fight these guys because I think they bring some interesting new design patterns to the table that will shake up the usual gameplay

Game Design

From a coding standpoint, I've still just been slaving away to get this achievement system in place.  It has been A LOT more work than I expected, but I think in the end it's all a net positive.  Last week I managed to add 175 achievements into the game along with a new game mechanic called weapon masteries.

Weapons each now have specific achievements that give them a flat level boost upon completion.  The goal here was to make it so players are rewarded for playing with their favorite weapons once they've unlocked everything the game has to offer.  This permanent boost will surely help in overcoming the later level bosses at the highest difficulty settings!

Next Week

Next week I think my goal is to finish cleaning up the achievement system.  Think includes adding a couple more fun achievements to give players that early game objective to work towards such as killing X enemies in a single hit or surviving Y minutes without taking any damage.  The goal is to make them just challenging enough that you can dedicate a run to grinding it out and have a little metagame progression as you play.

From an art perspective I'm hoping to see some color get added to the capsule art and to continue work on the elites for level 2.  For the elites this will be a joint effort because we're getting to the point where art meets gameplay, and Ref and I have been going back and forth a lot to get the attack patterns and wind up animations to feel just right for all the enemies.

But that's all for now, cheers!