Progress Update - December 2019

Hi everyone!

As the year draws to a close, here’s a rundown of what we’ve been up to this past month.

Factory Zone Enemies

To complement the industrial nature of the factory itself, I wanted to really lean into the steampunk element of the game. Furnace Face (far-right) is a heavy hitter with potential for nasty fire-based attacks. The Gear heads (center) could be a fast moving, projectile spraying spinning top of death. Lastly, the Gremlin (far left) are literal gremlins in the machine that may throw the odd spanner in the works...or at unsuspecting players :P

We still have a ton of zone work left to do before we implement this gallery of rogues, but I look forward to seeing each of them offer new challenges in the factory zone.

Zone Traps

The game’s existing traps are an aspect of the game that we’ve been wanting to improve and flesh out for a long time. The spike traps in particular are too frequent, and not readable enough during more intense moments. Along with improvements to the spike traps, we also started developing a few zone-specific traps to help offer greater variety and challenge. The flame vent trap below is one example, but we’ve also been developing a more variants for the other zones to help them feel more distinct.

Traps are very challenging to implement due to how much potential network latency/syncing factors into their timings for online multiplayer, so we still have plenty to work on before we're ready to push them live.

Mansion Boss/General Boss Foundation Work

We recently started taking a proper look at how we would like the game's bosses to be implemented. This encompasses everything from generating their floors as lockable arenas, playing boss-specific intro animations, and also how and where loot is generated. With all this in mind, we decided to use Lord Skullington's battle as a test bed, which can then be applied to the game's other bosses.

Gavin has been making some great process on this front, while I've been roughing out and developing his attack animations and supporting art. Here's a VERY rough WIP of his full beam spin attack.

That's everything for this month. We hope you have a great holidays, and we'll see you all in 2020!

Craig & Gavin