Devlog : Art

This week we spent a lot of time working on creating a more concrete vision for the art side of things. We worked on an art bible, in-game visuals, UI elements and colour schemes.

UI & Icons

We developed a concept for our UI and Heads up Display. The idea is for there to be simple, non distracting UI elements to compliment the gameplay. For example: We will have different potion recipes pop up at the top of the screen over time while the game goes on. These recipes will show the potion type and ingredient lists. On top of that the banner shape that these icons are displayed will also tell the player certain information about the potions. A good potion will have a simple rounded banner. A potion that is used offensively will have a 'spiky' shape.

We also worked on a simple menu design that follows the same principles.

Colours

Aside from UI, we also worked on colours for the characters and environments. In this first image you can see some colour concepts for the actual player characters. These colours should stay simple, so it is easy to discern each player, and contrasting from the background.

The same thing goes for the environmental assets. They should be pretty and colourful, yet not distracting from the gameplay. Therefor we set up some swatches and colour palettes that are not to harsh on the eyes, and still create enough contrast for all of the important gameplay elements to be shown on top of.

Prototype Scenes

One of our artists also took some time this week to work on a nicer prototype scene, to bring the art and tech together before we get started on the actual project.

Devlog : programming part

This week we combined assets with our mechanics, this made the mechanics much clearer.

For example last week we created the snails his path but without a clear indication off start and end, so speeding up our snail in the race felt meaningless.

This week we focussed more on the interactions between all game objects, like how the items react to contact with the witch or how collisions happen between 2 dashing witches and how we can influence their position. Also where do the items come from.

Knockback:

We felt it was important to get a big and clear reaction when you dash against anything so we started to experiment with;

The force you get when hit, when you hit another one. The time off stun you get afterwards and what happens to the item you were holding.

We decided that a big force but small stun time seems to most fun when testing.

The item that a character is holding wil fly out off his hand, back on the field. This makes the item free for all which opened up more gameplay possibilities.

We also liked the idea, if you are to hasty with picking up an ingredient by dashing to it it should bounce away from you.

This opened up the possibility of the need to build up skill and more strategies in the game.

e.g. Dash against a player right before he throws his potion to your snail, time your dash to get there fast but don’t push the item away.

Throwing:

Adding an ingredient to the cauldron or a potion to a snail needed to be more fun than just walk to it an press a button.

So we implemented a mechanic that throws the item in the direction you are looking at.

This would add a lvl off difficulty to the game, since you can miss and completely lose your potion if you just press the button and hope for the best.

But when you get to known to the mechanic, you can add more speed to your gameplay which gives a more accomplished feeling.

Strengthening your snail:

When the snail always keep moving, even if we do nothing and just eventually reaches the finish.

This felt really anticlimactic , so we needed to make this more difficult.

One off the ideas we tried is giving the snail an energy value, I mean with this that moving forward costs energy which need to be refilled so he can keep moving.

• The nutrition potion.

Another idea was putting obstacles in his way so that the snail cant progress any further.

So to get past this, the witch has to create a potion for it to give it the power to smash the obstacle to dust and the proceed to the race.

à Strengthening potion

The other potion we can make are for temporary influence their movement speed.

Item spawner:

A very important question we needed to answer was where do all the ingredients we need for the potions come from, where they appear and at what timing.

We created a system that will spawn an random ingredient around the centre off the field.

We did this because running at the first item at the start seemed like a nice way to say hello to your opponent (like in the way in boxing matches you touch gloves before start).

Only 1 ingredient will spawn at a set time around the same place, we decided to make the timing between the spawning relatively small to make sure you don’t always have to fight for the same thing.

Some ingredients like the crystal that is needed to give the snail the strength to destroy the obstacle is decided to be a more rare ingredient, since it is an important milestone in the game.

Conclusion:

 After implementing all this, we did hours off iterations to tweak all the variables to achieve the most fun and challenging experience when playing the game.