Hello fellows, Fernando here.
I forgot to tell you our main developer had to quit the project due to professional commitments, and I had to take over the programming duty. Our artist had problems that forced him to remake all animations, so we are still using placeholders for our characters.
What we already have done is making a game which is not perfect by any meaning, but at least serves as a very early playable prototype, allowing us to solve programming problems faster and in a better way.
- Enemy AI was one of the first things our original programmer had done. He also worked on hit detection. Both of them work well.
- Enemy spawners and checkpoints are done: In traditional beat-em-ups, one cannot advance through the level in one go, because the level is divided in areas which extremities are blocked until all enemies in this area are defeated. Thankfully our original programmer had done the hardest part of this.
- Enemies now collide with the checkpoints to ensure they won't get too far when entering in contact with the player.
- Time limiter now resets when the player trespasses a checkpoint. That was decided to decrease the difficulty of the game, since our level is quite long for now.
- Improved death management: We noticed if the player lost a life, its model could still get in contact with enemies and lose additional lives, leading to a quick game over. Because of this, we decided to deactivate the player character for a while when it dies, taking the life loss into calculation once the character is activated again.
- Now you can pause the game, but for now we decided not to make a pause menu, rather just displaying a message in the screen like in the 16-bit era beat-em-ups.
Things to do immediately include:
- Implement continue and game over screens
- Improve the scoring and checkpoint systems, guarantee checkpoints cannot be scored twice
- Improve animation transitions
- Implement additional scripts for the main menu and user interface
We also decided to put more healing items on the levels, since our tests of the current game version found the difficulty to be very high at this point. We recorded a video as a proof of concept the game is playable and has its rules implemented successfully, but for now, we are reserving it to a later date where the final character models are implemented.
