Hi there!

It's us again, the Fare Exchange development team. 

It was an intense week as we raced against our deadline to have a working demo of our game this week. We focused on implementing as much as possible of the necessary stuff for a fun playable game.

Art:

Block-outs

This week we focused on having most of the block-outs of all our props and environment assets ready and working in game.

We created some prop block-outs. We kept the colour palette as unobtrusive as possible, making sure to not draw our eyes away from the rest of the game. Since the props will just be obstacles to navigate around on the boat and the actual chaos of battling enemies and tasks is what the players really have to focus on.

We made rough drafts of some rocks that pass by while we are sailing the river. As well as the rocky outcrops, we internally call "islands" where out enemies will be on and jump onto our ship from, trying to attack us.

And worked on the lighting and colour palette of out scene a bit.

Boat Design

Another fun thing we looked at is finalising our boat design. Our base boat design is a cross between a classic Greek war ship and a stereotypical ferryman's boat that Charon is often depicted using. Looking at references of said ancient Greek boats, a fun design detail we liked and wanted to incorporate is how they painted an eye on each side of the boat in the front. They thought it looked intimidating to their enemies and we thought it was fun and interesting. We, of course, gave it our own little spin and made it a "dead" eye by crossing out the pupil. We thought of putting the eye in the back instead of the classic front, since our elevation is in the back, but in the end we decided to stick with the classic design of having the eye "intimidatingly" be in the front. 

Another custom detail is that the oars on the sides of the boat would come out of skulls instead of regular holes. We thought it might add a bit of that "underworld flair" to it, hehe. Having the oars stick out from the mouth of skull reliefs would allow us to also further enhance the visual by adding some special effects of a glow and mist coming out of the mouth and eyes of the skulls, indicating that the boat is fuelled by mystical powers instead of actual manpower.

Lastly, we looked at where we are going to position our "engine", the way to fuel the ship. Since the ship is mystically powered and typical engines weren't invented yet in ancient Greece, we came up with this fun idea of using an eternal flame to power the ship. You know the classic Grecian eternal flame, used in the Olympics to this day for example. (In real life it's not really eternal but shhhh). It's a fun way to tie the theme together again and will also help us make a visual indication to the players for the fuel level of the ship by making the flame bigger or smaller.

Sound:

Some basic layers for our environment have been added:

We experimented with splashing sounds of water by applying multieffects vsts and (even guitar plugins! ) to find that underworld vibe, and added a synth layer to match that super cool magic characteristic that our artists made in the shader.

We also added some adapted wood squeaking noises layers matching the buoyancy system that the programmers did for our boat.

We prepared also some cool FX related with player feedback!

Developers:

Unfortunately, again, we had a lot of errors and bugs to fix these week so we could not work that much further to our own planning.

• There wasn't a player asset. (Genuinely we have no idea how that happened)
• There still aren't any animations because, somehow, there is another behaviour three. This means tasks don't work yet since their progress is cued with a notifier in animations.
• There were some bugs with how many players there should spawn.
• and more...

We could implement and test the islands that our amazing artists made. Those get randomly rotated and transformed a bit so that we don't have that repetitive feeling!

What's next?

A new sprint will be started. Hopefully that one will go much smoother. But yeah, we are going to try and kick it up a gear. A big thing on the agenda is created a satisfying player feedback loop. Having special effects and sounds added to the tasks and combat will hopefully make everything that much more enjoyable.

Until next week! 

The Fare Exchange Team