Team Progress Progress was slow this week; our team had been catching up with other classes and taking a breather after the continuous work we'd put in for previous weeks. We were still able to do some work on the game, primarily research and exploration of different art styles. Our visuals team created some concept art exploring other approaches to drawing our assets, as we have found our current style to be too difficult to recreate continuously for a full game in the time that we have left for this project. Simplifying the art style would also help us remain consistent with our work and how it looks, especially since there are 2 different people doing visuals. My Contribution I created some thumbnail example scenes to illustrate my suggestion for a new visual approach. Prior to this, I looked up existing 2D scenes online as inspiration for the way we could present our game visually. With this proposed style, I primarily simplified the way I shaded the objects in the scene, which significantly sped up the drawing process. I also added less depth in the space that the player can walk in, resembling a more 2D platformer environment than our previous prototype's style. Although it isn't specifically demonstrated in visuals, I've also started thinking of more ways the player can interact with the environment to enhance gameplay and encourage more exploration. An example is the visibility of underground elements in the game map; players could unlock and trigger the visibility of hidden areas by interacting with a door. This may encourage players to seek out more interactions in the areas they are in.
Reflection Despite the unusual lack of work done this week, I believe the short break our team had was necessary to face the work we will need to do for the upcoming milestone. We have yet to deliberate on which visual approach to officially go with, but this is part of the list of things we will start to work on real soon. The main issue that we had to face for the previous prototype was getting the code to work in the way that we wanted it to. In the upcoming days, we plan on addressing the problems we encountered with our game's functionality and re-implementing different assets to suit our new level design.
