And we're back! The biggest news to share is that--save for a few loose ends--we've officially completed our first milestone! 🥳 This first milestone was all about putting in place some much-needed foundational and structure stuff, like getting FMOD (audio middleware) integrated, making our procedural generator more flexible/configurable, and establishing standards for how we organize assets. With this out of the way, we can now move into full production!

The Ice World Cometh

As I mentioned last time, our primary goal is to deliver one new world with each milestone. For milestone two, we'll be focusing on adding an ice world. We started with an early concept of the tileset and art assets:

We then prototyped a couple of new enemies (a stealthy ice block, and a version of the worm enemy from world one that slides around instead of crawling), and have a couple more in the works. (You can see an early version of one of them in Studio VDS's latest YouTube video.)

Naturally, the ice block enemy freezes the player temporarily. 🥶

(Side note: we've been discussing whether or not we'll have other enemies or hazards that freeze the player, but have agreed to try not to overdo it!)

Lastly, we've also implemented a system for adding special floors. Naturally, this will mean slippery floors in the ice world:

And perhaps other types of floors in other worlds? 🤔

Choices Matter

Our secondary goal for each milestone is to give the player more choice about how they play, how they interact with the world, etc. In milestone two, this will take the form of weapon upgrades. As of now, we're thinking we'll try to embrace the spirit of roguelikes*: each weapon will have several parameters (say, range, speed, strength, etc.), and a set of randomized upgrades will be generated with each run. This way, no two runs are exactly the same, but as a player, you'll still be able to make meaningful choices about how to upgrade your weapons as you progress.

(*Caveat: this is by no means a roguelike, the genre is just one of our many influences.)

A Pinch of This, a Dash of That

This is the part of the devlog where I mention random things that I couldn't find a home for elsewhere, hehe. First up: 8 directions of dashing!

Next up: a mini-map! This will hopefully make it easier to navigate the levels, as some of the early feedback is that players were often getting stuck.

And last but not least, an early version of a world destruction system that you'll see us build out over the next little while. (I won't totally spoil the surprise yet by mentioning how this will be used!)

Well, that about does it for this time! Thanks for reading, we'll see you again in about a month,

Adam/The Cosmocat