Our second devlog...I think we will eventually make a standalone page for this but with our recent pivot we're not quite there yet.
What's changed?
This week, we focused on introducing more interesting decisions for the player. As of last week, we were still having issues creating a compelling AI, and we found it hard to control the ball. Realizing that our soccer concept had limited novelty and decision making, we moved to more of a hybrid between soccer and platforming. To that end, we created a stadium with a series of evolving challenges that would use all the gameplay mechanics we’ve implemented, from soccer to jumping to gliding. This change necessitated a new mechanic to improve player control of the ball, so we added the telekinesis mechanic, allowing the player to shoot the ball accurately.
We also attempted to add more visual interest to our game via a custom stadium and some shaders. However, we ran into some roadblocks because of the way the stadium’s mesh collider handled objects being inside of it, so we ended up having to scrap most of it for this build.
What's next?
We hope to improve our stadium so that there aren’t any issues with collisions. Furthermore, while playtesting the jumping stage, we found that quite a few of the platforms were too narrow to really build up the momentum for a jump. We need to continue testing this phase in order to ensure that it works well with the movement mechanics and vice versa. Finally, with the design of the stage/stage progression relatively finalized, we can focus in on making sure that our movement mechanics feel great in this setting.
Build
Here is a link containing the Windows and Mac builds, and our credits.