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This week was pretty hectic, to say the least. Many errors on release that we were not aware of as a team cropped up somehow during the latter half of this month, but it has been resolved. We also have a great deal of quality of life changes that, from my work, I will showcase here.

Ability Unlocks

The abilities unlocked across your progression of the game that are triggered per level are shown to the player. Prior to this, we did not really have any indication, if any, of the player having these unlocked in the respective terminal used in our project to swap abilities.

Ability Screen Reflecting Unlocked Rewards

Therefore, the ability you unlock is now selectable. This amplifies the replayability and progression in our game tenfold.

Hey guys, Arian here with this week's dev log.

So far we have strung out as many abilities as possible for us, but we never really had a way of managing them for the player's experience. It was always something that we hardcoded for testing any and all issues that may pertain from their use cases; this we will do no more. From the start we planned on the abilities being managed via terminal changes at the end of each boss, such that the abilities unlocked from completing bosses are offered as rewards and incentives for replayability in our game.

Furthermore, we have these abilities being saved in our external game instance where multiple variables are being saved as well, such as options settings saved by the player and (coming in the next few days) mouse sensitivity. Having these configs available for the player in their last saved preference is beyond imperative as a bare minimum for player experience. 

Lastly, we have a grappling hook ability now. We wanted to provide as much momentum the player can possibly have at their disposal, and this is just another example of such. We have the grappling hook set to its own ability slot, and I will personally continue to work on fleshing out this ability to industry status as much as I feasibly can.

We have much more planned, and a lot to get done. This may not look like much now, but things will drastically change for our game from here on out,

Stay tuned.

Hi, Arian here. This week's dev log includes the usage of grenades that create rifts in time and space.  The grenade can successfully damage any and all actors within the collision range upon exploding. However, it has been a bit tricky to get both a gradual damage being applied over time, as well as having a slowing/pulling aspect to any actors affected in said area. 

Another hiccup of sorts is that the sphere collision in which the damage is applied to any actors in said area launches them towards the black hole. This being said, the launching is short and has no effective application as of yet. One main thing I will have to work on above all else is to have the player be continuously pulled towards the grenade post-explosion, such that during its entire lifespan it serves as a continual crowd-control ability, rather than some meaningless movement burst.

After speaking with the group, the grenade idea turned from a simple placeholder that would be deprecated in the near future to our first crowd-control feature in the game. There is still much work to be done, as well as other abilities such as reinforced damage reduction and a throwable javelin with knockback. 

(EDIT 12/6/2023 6:05 AM - Reference image showcasing the functionality no longer embed properly, so it was replaced)