By Cailean Treloyn, Ross Vandenberg, Winston Stuart and Aymen Abdalla

Welcome

-Cailean

Welcome to week 3 or so of development for STILTS. I wish I had great news, but unfortunately, the clock keeps ticking forward, and STILTS is all but stationary. This week, we will talk about what we have done, the many battles lost and some battles won! (hopefully) And what comes next.

Level Design

-Ross and Aymen

It's been a busy week for level design this week. We managed to get multiple hazards working throughout the level (Ice for the player character to slip on, Lava to cause the scene to reset and mud to slow the player down when they walk through it.

We also managed to change up how the camera system worked. Now, instead of having just a simple camera attached to the player, we have multiple camera's throughout the scene which can change how the game is viewed when the player enters certain areas, changing the view from being statically attached to the back of the player, to being something more flexible and more akin to some of the earlier god of war games (although these cameras follow the player).

We also added moving platforms for the player to traverse and many other obstacles for the player character to try and dodge.

We have greyboxed the majority of the vertical slice for the level and are relatively happy with how things are turning out. But some of the environmental hazards do require the movement system to be in place so we will be focusing our future efforts to ensure this part of the project is working.

Modelling

- Cailean

Welcome to my little slice of game dev. What did I get up to? Well, if you followed the last devlog, you would have seen my sketches and deliberations about how to implement the STILTS. I have spent this past week developing the STILTS and the player character. Let's talk about it.

I first focused on the player character. Unlike the character I used in the demo, which lacks a head. It also has some odd proportions, which made it awkward with a stilt. (I.e. Long torso, short limbs, no head).  So, the first thing to change was... a head. How do I implement a head, you may ask?  Well, a head is kind of round, but not totally. For low-poly models, we do not want to work with a perfectly round sphere. (Getting something to look "smoothly spherical" would take a lot of vertices.)  So, we need a low-poly sphere? So, let's add a sphere! NOPE! We add a cube, then a subdivision modifier. Why is this? Well, it creates a low-poly sphere. 

Now, this is a good start. After this, I started extruding and manipulating this to build out the player character, scaling, and extruding and tweaking out bits. I use loop tools heavily (a really cool blender addon) to change square edges into vaugely sphereical, then extruding this out into limbs.


And I came up with this. It's very simple, I tried to make the proportions more aligned with our requirements.

I then developed a STILT for this person to rest on; this was much easier to put together. I created a cylinder. Then gave it a base and a peg via extrusion and scaling.

Movement - A Nonstop Cavalcade of Suffering

- Winston

Well, I wish that there was some good news to share, but unfortunately, it seems that once again, the movement system appears to be the problem child of the project, as while both the Level Design and Modelling are proceeding apace, the movement system has all but ground to a halt. So let's go into what's actually changed.

The first major change is that the player is now actually able to balance by itself, even with one stilt raised. Because of this, we can remove the giant block feet on the bottom of the stilts, since their purpose was to keep the model upright.

The second major change is that each stilt is now capable of returning to a central position when the stilt of the opposite side is lifted.

Unfortunately, however, this is about the point where the good news stops. Because, as you most likely noticed in the above gif, for all the additions that are made the movement system, the fact of the matter is that the player is still unable to reliably move forward using the mechanics in their intended manner. And with the project's finish line rapidly approaching, that fact is quickly becoming a problem.

What's next?

So, testing is next week! This is a problem. We will need to create a testing regime for getting feedback. But with the progress currently at a roadblock, we need to consider what the way forward is, if we need to reshape the project into something more achievable. We will give updates. Thank you for following the development anyways. 

-Cailean