Devlog #2: Character Concepts, Parrying, and More

Hello! Welcome to Week 2 of Salt, Grooves, and Garlic development.

The earbuds idea is certainly not final but we thought it was funny.

We worked on a bunch of new features this week. The boss has new AI, new attack patterns, and a placeholder model. Pickups also now spawn on the grid, which can be collected to send an automatic attack towards the boss (the exact behaviour of the pickups is subject to change)

We also added the foundation for the parrying system, which forces the player to make block inputs with a complex rhythm in order to avoid damage. The attacks are sent out and blocked in sync with the music, with a call and response composition.

(At the moment the attacks look like they miss, but the idea is that they damage you no matter where you are on the board, unless you parry with the correct timing.)

Some other things we worked on:

• A sample of a new music track being worked on, which can be listened to in the tech demo video
• Improving our rhythm/beat manager system
• Creating a system to load files that define beat/timestamps of attacks/events into the game, to allow designers to edit timings in sync with the music
• Adding a pause feature, which is more complicated than usual due to the audio needing to be synced perfectly after you unpause