Arbiter - Monthly Recap - January 2021 (Patreon)

A NEW YEAR IS UPON US!!

Welcome, friends. Last month I talked about how I was working on level blockouts and new traversal mechanics! This month, I'll be focused on some of the new stuff I've been working on such as new level blockouts and traversal mechanics! Let's get to it!

I wasn't super happy with my original blockout after playtesting, so I spent the first bit of this month making a new one. I tried a new process for this one where I did a sketch for the different layers of the level and then just modeled over the sketch directly in Unity using ProBuilder. It actually worked really well, and went way faster than building the level out manually.

This is a very simple sketch but I feel it's more or less self explanatory. Red is enemies, yellow is wall runs, and the white arrows are soul streams (dash points, basically). I then literally dropped this into Unity on a flat plane and built the geometry with ProBuilder.

It's changed quite a bit from this sketch now, so it's not wholly accurate anymore, but nevertheless planning things out made the process infinitely easier than just winging it. Who'da thought?

Afterwards I went back to building traversal mechanics. The new ones I created were doors (boring, but are a nice natural way to enforce combat encounters), and sliding (with style!). The doors are pretty straightforward (they're doors), but the sliding's a little more interesting.

A couple months ago I mentioned how I'm personally more interested in fun traversal mechanics than over-complicated level design, and that still applies here. Sliding is pretty simple: you slide down the slope, occasionally you make a jump or a dash to another slope. Like the wall-running, soul streaming, etc., it's simply another tool to make for some more fun/interesting level design so Ashe isn't just sprinting from Point A to B. 

That said, I'm a hopeless sinner who will make any and all blood sacrifices unto the altar of style. During the early stages, Ashe could still kind of Parry while he was sliding, and while it was completely unintentional, it looked too cool to leave out. As such, I made it so that when he Dodges/Parries while sliding, he'll do a little trick flip that doubles as a jump. This serves absolutely zero purpose whatsoever, it just looks neat. But that's the kind of game we're making here, folks.

I'm thinking of some other stuff like speed boosts that only work when you're in the correct phase (light or dark), but I don't wanna go too crazy. Most of the fun will come from how all these traversal mechanics interact to make Ashe burst through the levels at lightning speed. I've already got more than enough tools to work with for the Demo Level, so I'll probably stop there for now.

In the meantime, I've also been doing some overall gameplay polish so the game doesn't feel like ass. This involved fixing some stuff like accurately hitting enemies with air combos, making character controllers properly slide off of each other, pushing away enemies in your way, etc. Just technical quirks/fixes so everything works as intended. 

I'll be doing some enemy and ability polish to top that off, and then I'll likely get back to level design. I'm almost at a happy place with the demo level so I can start making it look like not-ass, but I'm saving that for as long as possible so I don't waste any time making assets I'm not gonna use. I've got a pretty good idea where I'm going art direction-wise with the level, so it'll mostly just come down to putting the work in to model/texture the assets. Fun, fun.

Anyways, that's where we're at for now. Big thanks to the new patrons as of late! Your support fuels my soul. Hopefully next month I can start showing what proper encounters look like, we'll see! Until then~

Cheers,
Jordy