Hey everyone! We were silent for a couple of months as some Real Life events slowed us down. But we're now back to the grindstone
Update 5The project now has some additional team members working on it; we have a concept artist (Will) who's been helping us with arena design and an environment artist (Rude) to bring those concepts to life in engine.
We can show off an arena concept that Will has been working on lately...
While Rude has been building out our first real arena, the Training Area:
More arenas will come online over time as we go.
Last time I promised discussion about characters and abilities. We can show off the next character that Andrew has been working on: Kyu!
big version:
http://i.imgur.com/KVcJrJI.pngAn early sketch of Kyu was shown at the beginning of the thread, but now she's been fleshed out and made real.
Kyu is a royal member of a hyper-intelligent cat race and gets around the arena with the help of her mech suit.
The rigging of Kyu's model is just finishing up and soon we'll be able to move into animation. We now have three characters modelled and rigged: Vlad, Kyu, and Volley (although Vlad needs a check-up). Since Volley's rig is the most refined at the moment, we're going to use Volley for all our animation testing in the arena. Once we know exactly what's necessary and how it works, we can animate the rest of the cast.
Kyu-based lighting tests:
As for abilities, we've been doing some further thinking.
In original WJ, you use your power move by pressing the throw button at a specific time while being under a popped disc. This isn't necessarily wrong, but we wanted to see if we could deepen the moveset and make the controls less obscure.
As I said previously, we're approaching much of the design from the perspective of a fighting game. So our current plan for abilities is this:
Each character will have a signature move and an ultimate move, accessed through a power meter. There will be a passive growth on the bar, but it will also build with skilled play. The strength of the passive increases as the game goes on longer, so the goal is that matches start out with skilled technical play to build meter, and then start to see more and more special moves as play gets more intense.
Signature moves are unique to each character. They will probably look something like this:
Ultimate moves can only be used if the meter is completely filled. So if the player foregoes signature moves for a time, they can try one. Ultimates aren't directly offensive like signatures; we're going to try making them utility based too, giving effects like defensive buffs, extra movement skills etc for a period of time. The system might work or it might need further tweaking but we'll see how it goes.
Naturally the ultimate moves will feature fighter-style cutaways to show off our nice characters
Finally an update on the programming front. Lately I've been trying to build out some solid fundamentals to the project that we can rely on. Here are some gifs of the game's menu-in-progress:
As well as the menu I've been doing a lot of work on controls and input. I've decided to take input really seriously given that the game will likely need some pretty technical play. I was looking at cInput for a while for easy implementation but it just didn't have the features I wanted so I ended up building my own. (Unfortunately there are no gifs of this lmao)
I took a lot of inspiration from Elite's controls menu which is the most adaptable and accommodating rebind system I've seen so far. In ours, you can use a combination of up to 4 keys of any type, on any kind of action, with no restricted keys or duplications. This includes any kind of controller and control stick. You could play Shot One with a steering wheel if you wanted to.
The menu and controls sort of tie into each other so I've been working on them in parallel. But once controls are done I'll be moving to player profiles - my goal is a system roughly similar to Rocket League's, where players can drop in or out of the party at any time and can likely go online together.
Next update: Party system
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