Even though the game has been in development for quite a while, this is our first 'official' steam devblog so we'll call it NUMERO UNO!
Development Updates
Character Movement
This week, we focused a lot on player traversal mechanics. The player map in Lamplight Station is very vertical, and navigating it can be a challenge so we want to find ways to make moving through the space fun and rewarding.
Wall running can bridge short gaps, or let you avoid obsticles on the floor
The first mechanic we implemented and tested is a short 'wall run' ability. This allows the player to traverse across small gaps by moving along a wall.
Here you can see the ledge-grabbing ability, and how you can string this together with wall running.
The second traversal feature is ledge climbing. If a ledge is too tall to jump up on, but low enough to reasonably be able to grab hold of, the player can pull themselves up to the ledge. Ledging also affords a last ditch chance to make a jump that is slightly too long, by grabbing the edge as you fall. This feature will take a few more iterations to tune up, but I can already tell it's going to be fun.
Sound
The other big news for the week is that we've officially started working with an audio guy. Audio has a huge impact on the immersiveness of gameplay, and we are excited to see what kind of awesomness he comes up with, and share our progress on that front soon. The Unreal 4 Engine, which the game is built on has received a large rewrite of the audio system, so we plan on leveraging those systems pretty heavily as we move forward.
Crafting
Emergent complexity and player choice are two big components of the crafting system in Lamplight Station. This requires some careful though in terms of user interface design to keep things understandable and not overwelming.
To that end, we iterated on the crafting interface a couple times this week, and feel that we are starting to get much closer to something we are happy with, and we can start thinking about the visual presentation a bit more in the coming weeks.
-Trev