Second Devlog: Deadeye Desperado

It's been another fantastic week of development here on Deadeye Desperado. We got a lot of great work done, and got a solid build for a playtest.

2D 

Starting off we have the 2D art department.

We've got a lot going on here. Concept art for the Lantern, Chest and Town. I'm pretty happy with these designs, and they are currently being moved over to 3D to have models made. The town needs a few more stages of concepting before that will happen however. We also have the Crosshairs and Hit Marker. I like these designs, but they may change as we further develop the UI of the game.

3D

Next up we have some fantastic work from the 3D Art department

Starting off we have the Large Golem enemy modeled. This went through a stage with the arms and legs as one piece, which quickly became a problem for my animators. To solve this, we cut each limb in half, allowing all pieces to float freely. This is a solid base for the semi cartoony style i was looking for, and i hope we can accentuate it with texturing later.

In addition this sprint, we had a nice set of modular cave walls and tunnels made. This will help us build out our levels in an easy and reusable way.

In addition to this, we have an archway to be used as a doorway, and as a decoration once we get outside the caves. I love the way these models are looking, and i'm excited to see more from them next sprint.

Programming

Next up we have Programming, which did a mix of things this sprint, as the last. This section will be mostly explanations, but you will see their contributions better in the gameplay i show later.

First off we have a finished version of the Crystal Puzzle script, which has been placed into levels and tested to make sure it works as intended. This has three settings controlled by an Enum. The first setting is six crystals in a row, no missed shots, in a specific order. The second is simply six crystals that must be destroyed. The last is a crystal that ups the player's combo, and provides light.

In addition we have this great options menu which is saving colors and sound settings into Unity's PlayerPrefs. These settings will be expanded upon in the future, but are on the backburner for now in favor of a save system.

Here we have an animation tree made for the revolver by one of my programmers. It shows how the revolver itself and the chamber will be animated separately to ensure we can rotate the chamber whenever we choose, even if the gun is any animation state. This has been slightly revised, as we will be controlling the chamber with a script now rather than animations, but it is good to see the thought put into it.

Animation

Moving on we have some Animations that got finished for the Revolver.

 Seen here is the updated version of the idle animation, but we have firing and revolving animations as well that aren't shown here. Some animations also got concepted for the blaster ranged golems we have coming up. Unfortunately i can't show you the latter as i can only link to youtube on this website.

In addition we have our golem fully rigged, and it is ready to be animated upon. Can't wait to see what comes of him as our animators get a hold of him. We have a spin attack planned, as well as a potential jumping animation for traversing off-mesh links.

Level Design

Finally we have some great work from our Level Design Department

This is the base layout for the Red Puzzle. This has been changed a bit with furnishing, But this was the basic look. The idea of this puzzle is to shoot the 6 crystals (pink) in a certain order, currently denoted by the map on the left. This will be replaced by runes eventually, but that is still in the pipeline.

This is the Blue Puzzle. The blue lines are the tracks that the minecarts travel along. The goal of this room and the Red Room is to crack 6 crystals in a row without breaking your combo. The blue bullets slow down the minecarts for you, allowing you to make the shots with less effort.

This is the rough layout of the hub hallway area, this had to be reworked to get to the version we have now, and i'm sure there will be more iterations as we go.

This is a furnished version of the red level. The crystals are much harder to see in this photo, but they are there and working.

Finally this is a furnished version of the Green Puzzle room, which will require the player to heal themselves using crystals and the green bullet. At the same time, poison gas will be chipping away their health bar. Their goal is to make it through alive, and learn the purpose of the green bullet.

Playtest Results

We also had a rather successful playtest in this sprint, and i want to talk a little about what we will be changing moving forward with those results.

There were two major issues we ran into this playtest. The first being that overall, the levels were way too dark. Players could get lost in the darkness and be unsure how to progress. We will fix this with torched critical paths and an overall bump to gamma.

The second major issue has to do with the UI. The six bullets around the player's cursor seemed like a good idea at first. However in practice,  the enemies tend to get lost in all of the information at that point on the screen. We're talking about the many ways this could be fixed. These range from simply moving the six shot ui to the bottom left corner, to changing the six shots to a vertical pillar beneath the crosshairs.

We also began to consider how the player would control which shots they had active. We bounced around ideas of toggling which ones are active and loading randomly, or picking which bullets are loaded in specifically, one shot at a time. This will be combined with the manual revolving to give the player a decent amount of control over which bullets they shoot when.

This is the brunt of the work we have done at the moment, but some things may have been glossed over. Anything not included here, you bet you will see the results of it in the gameplay. 

Fantastic work overall, and i'm super excited to keep the momentum up.

Until next time,

Deadeye Desperado Dev Team