Hey everybody, it's Halloween! Okay, maybe technically it's not quite here yet, but with the beginning of October Styrofoam tombstones and plastic body parts will be ubiquitous anyway, and I'm happy to take the excuse to enjoy the leadup to the night itself. I'll be soaking in as much as I possibly can of the spooky vibrations the month will provide to fuel Trigger Treat's development. We're aiming to get the demo of the game's first level out to you patrons as soon as possible, so September was spent working particularly feverishly. I'm eager to show off the fruits of my labor after such a productive period! Progress continues on assets for the beginning of the game, including these finished NPC animations. I'm very happy with how they came out, and while some required a little fiddling to get just right, I feel that their sense of personality was perfectly preserved.
For the moment we only require one direction for them to run in, but eventually I'd like to grant them the ability to turn in any direction for challengingly slippery gameplay. As you can see, they all are animated slightly differently, and in some cases will have subtly different behavior for both visual variety and mechanical purposes. Soon we'll be dropping them into the game's engine to try them out!
Speaking of incorporating the assets into the game, last month I promised a peek at the room we'll be using to test out gameplay. Here's a nonspecific space incorporating an array of design elements as an example of what Trigger Treat environments would look like. It won't appear in the final game as it's meant primarily for beta testing, but also allowed me some practice with how I'll want to build the look of the world before putting actual room layouts together. A lot of careful consideration went into the development of this room, and despite not being as flashy as animated work it feels like September's biggest accomplishment for me.
Both unique drawings and repeatable tiles went into making the room, which gave me a reason to start upscaling some of the tile art from the older versions of the game. This is one of the things we will need to be testing for, both irregular shapes and traditionally rigid tile collisions will be present throughout the game and are represented here. Figuring out the logistics of this idea ahead of time was important, and was only one of many concepts that require planning not just from the perspective of art production but programming as well. Dark shadows may alter characters' color palettes, and objects will intrude into the frame from the foreground, all in service of creating a dynamic and precarious feeling characteristic of German Expressionism. This style has been long used to inspire horror aesthetics for a good reason, and I can't wait to show off more ideas for environments as other environments progress.
After so long working on NPC allies and playable characters, the majority of my work for the coming weeks will finally be focused on threats to the player! I've already started some preliminary animations for the first level's most common enemy. These are being animated a little differently than previous characters, using a system of mixed designs overlaid over a basic skeleton. This process will be more readily apparent in coming gamedev streams, but at the same time I'll be working on other obstacles like this deadly tractor. Several different enemies will be needed for this first level, so prepare yourselves for more wicked monsters than we've seen yet. It's arguably the part of this game that I've been looking forward to doing the most, so I hope you all enjoy what I've been brewing!
-Julian