Per a suggestion on Cohost, I updated the grappling hook's line renderer to follow a sine wave path instead of just being straight. I'm really pleased with how this turned out. It's completely static, but it almost seems to animate as you zoom past it.
I spent most of the week learning how to use ProBuilder for whiteboxing. I'm not great at it yet, but I've landed on a flow that works for me, relying mainly on the Poly Shape tool. I did a pass on all of the platforms, giving them some basic detail to indicate their eventual theming (waterfall island, hedge maze island, graveyard island, etc.).
I spent some time today playing with the UI + presentation of the game. I gave it a low resolution — 480x360, the same as some N64 games — and inset the play area a bit. With these changes, my blocky placeholder whiteboxed shapes all of a sudden looked... correct? fitting? I'm not saying this is necessarily the final look, but it was very encouraging to stumble upon something that felt cohesive and, to me, interesting. I'd love if I could have this game wrapped in a few months so I can move onto the next game. So, if I'm able to lean into a low-resolution + low-poly style to cut down on dev time, I think I'll do it. Who knows how things will turn out! My plan is to keep iterating on this style and see where it leads.
And as always, here's the roadmap looking ahead:
More level design.
Iterate on visual style.
Actually model the environments in Blender ProBuilder, since I think I can get away with that now.
Sounds and music.
Create the endgame sequence, displaying the player's time and a brief cinematic.
Start menu, settings menu, pause menu.
Polish, polish, polish, polish.
Bugfix, bugfix, bugfix, bugfix.
Done???
As always, thanks for reading! Will post again next week.