Hello wonderful people from the internet!
Welcome to the fifth part of our progression blog series! These posts are our way of sharing our development journey with you. In this update, we’re sharing what we’ve been working on lately and what we are doing this week.
With the milestone in September always in mind, we are currently restructuring our project and see this as a great opportunity to make changes.
What is the current state of play?
As already mentioned in blog four, our project is still undergoing reconstructions this week and next. That may sound worse than it actually is but a long-term project needs maintenance from time to time to make room for new ideas and solutions. This also means that the game won’t be receiving much new content for now, so we don’t have any new abilities or mechanics to showcase this week. However, we’ve come up with a new approach that could significantly change the game experience, but more on that in the game design section. This also means that by tomorrow this blog or the tasks we describe here may no longer be completely accurate.
Another important point to clarify is the following. In case it is not known, we are still students and are approaching our bachelor thesis, which will begin in October. Therefore, alongside working on ENSO, we also need to focus on successfully completing our studies, which naturally takes time. But don’t worry, we are not going to disappear for half a year or stop working on the game. The content we produce may just be slightly reduced or delayed. We still have time to continue developing the game and remain fully committed to it.
But now to this week’s tasks and changes
Game Design
Even though the playtest was successful in the first place, we of course received feedback that we want to implement and the thing that stood out was definitely the lack of orientation, this was already quite obvious before but now we wanted to tackle this problem. We thought long and hard about how to address this, signposts, colors in the UI, minimap and environmental cues, but then we came up with a new very profound idea. We will separate the four realms (up/down/right/left) into distinct worlds each of them only fully visible at once. Explaining this is not easy, so here is a short video to explain the core idea of it.
Concept Rotation Realm Rework
Of course, we will test this extensively and evaluate whether this type of rotation, where the assets depend on their orientation, works better or not. This will be thoroughly tested over the next few weeks.
Art
Due to the recent changes and new approaches, the art department is currently somewhat on hold. We first need to see how the new idea develops before we can begin to specifically conceptualize elements like the environments for the different worlds. However, we will continue working on the enemies, as their general types and shapes are likely to remain the same. The next enemy will be a flying one, which moves in a curved pattern. Here’s a concept of it:
Flying Enemy Concept
Summer has finally arrived, and the hoodie is starting to feel a bit too warm. So, we’re currently designing a T-shirt that we can wear to events and other occasions, without getting overwhelmed by the heat.
T-Shirt Concept
Programming
Since we want to adjust our architecture and further strengthen our systems in terms of maintainability, modularity, and performance, we are continuing to revise our code and existing objects. For example, we have significantly shortened our physics script and the script responsible for various operations, making them much less dependent, in fact even independent. A key goal of this overhaul is to design components in a way that allows them to function with minimal or, preferably, no dependencies.
We are also extensively reworking the enemy system and transitioning from the Blackboard Behavior Tree to a state machine, which we are already using for the player. This state machine will also be revised during the process. Additionally, all editors and inspectors are being reworked and standardized. Yes, we planned to do that from the beginning – but hey, time.
That’s it for this week’s update! There’s still plenty of work ahead, but we’re making solid progress and it’s exciting to watch things come together. Every improvement, no matter how small, brings us closer to the game we envision.
Thank you for being part of this journey whether you’re reading along, offering feedback, or simply supporting us from the sidelines. Your encouragement means a lot, and we’re looking forward to sharing more with you in the weeks to come!
