Milestone 4

Good morning everyone!

Our team has been up to some serious work lately; we've been busy tightening up in-game mechanics, added art to the prototype, and challenged stage 3 last week and passed! This means we're now in the possible pool for being able to present at mid-year show. We're trying to gather as much together as we can to challenge stage 4 and see if we can get by it.

Our game is a combat platformer where players take on the role of ghosts residing in a mansion who fight each other for sole 'ownership' of the house. Now that you're all refreshed, let's take a look at some screenshots and concept stuff, then.

Here we have some screenshots of what the prototype looks like. The top one is more in-game and the bottom is a more detailed look. This level is mainly what we've been focusing on. The levels of the game are going to be based on specific rooms in the mansion (or small groups of rooms). So for example here, we have the dining room and below it, the wine cellar.
A main goal/thing I want for our environments is to be able to have some modularity in the levels. (This means that I'd like for different items to be usable in different parts of the house without having to alter them  much. So I can use those chairs in other rooms in the house, or that table, or break those stair 'pieces' apart and be able to mix and match them. Think of it like Lego blocks.)

As you can see here, this was one of the main concepts for designing the levels. Other parts of the room are slightly visible, showing the player they can use their phasing mechanic to ghost through the wall and go into the other room. You'll be able to see the framework of the house, mimicking a sort of dollhouse-like feeling.

Here are some concepts for the characters and members of the family in the house. They're colored in this way as that's the way we're going to denote each different player

This is a more concrete example of the stylization we're going to go for in the characters when they're in-game. This example is of the mother ghost.

A big roadblock for our game had been animation and all things entailed with that. I had a lot of issues with setting up the rig and skinning the character, but we got things to a workable place.

There's still some work left to do until senior show, but I think we're getting into a better place. This whole experience has been quite the ride, and we're in it for one more week, mid year presentations take place on Monday the 18th!

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for this week.