Road Trip
This week we went to on a bit of a research mission to two of the nicest looking places in the UK, the Cotswolds and Wales.
We grew up in the English countryside for the most part, so it’s not like we had a lack of experience to draw on when making Summerford, but we thought it would helpful to take a look at different types of villages a bit further from home.
We managed to visit some very pretty looking villages, a few less pretty but more functional ones, some countryside and farm areas, and a ruined cathedral.
We capped the trip off with a quick visit to an abandoned boys summer camp in the absolute middle of nowhere.
It’s a huge area with an abandoned basketball court, pool, church and apartments and a great reference for making Summerford seem realistic in its decay.
We weren’t there completely legally though, and got a bit scared by a truck parked at the front gates, but we still got some great material, both in terms of reference pictures and textures we’ll use directly in the game.
Back in the office
Back at work, we’ve been compiling and testing out some of those textures we’ve picked up, and also had a few days to work on some basic features.
The school interiors are mostly finished now save for a bit of detailing, though we’re still testing out the larger, third person outside area we mentioned last week as that's a larger departure from the original design we had for the school. Here's a quick preview of the new dining hall:
We’re also tweaking some puzzle and design stuff in the school. For example, we had a boss in our EGX demo, which made sense as a nice conclusion to a standalone demo, but feels badly placed in the context of a larger game.
Instead, we’re keeping the key areas and puzzles but moving certain things around so that the end of the school is a bit less intense and sudden, and fits better with the pace of the full game.
We’ve also managed to add back loading between areas, and we’ve also created a basic save/load system which will obviously be very important moving forwards, even if it's not the most exciting thing to talk about in a dev log.
Indie MEGABOOTH
We’re hoping to do a submission to the Indie MEGABOOTH for Pax West, which means we need to have a build of some sort by, at the very, very latest, the 7th May.
Whether or not this will end up happening will depend on exactly how far we can get next week with both level design of the outside area and the programming on hitherto under developed features, but we thought it would be cool to submit.
Next Week
With a full, normal week with no holidays and Wales trips to content with, we're hoping to finally get that school behind us. Obviously our main goal is the MEGABOOTH demo.
Unlike the EGX though, this is all work that needs to be done and we won’t be rushing to put together something we later won’t use in the game. We’ll simply submit what we’ve got before the deadline and see how we go.
By very early next week the main gameplay loop should be back up and working with our new systems, so that should hopefully give us plenty of time to work on the key areas that still need more development, such as basic combat and the game’s map and objective system.