Well, first week of a 2-week sprint has been completed. We can say it has indeed been a sprint, as we are supposed to have 3 weeks for this first part - only we spent one more week on prototyping. But hey, we are back on schedule, and it’s starting to look good, too.

Redoing the code

A lot of code needed to be redone, as what we had before was a mix of quickly thrown together blueprints and half-decent c++ classes. After putting some thought into the structure we would need, we went to work and created a good base for the rest of the game. Not everything has been implemented yet, resulting in some currently empty functions, but the start is there. This is how the game currently looks: As you can see, the artists have been working on some stuff too. Very soon, this planet will look like an actual living planet instead of an empty patch of tiles that happened to have taken on the shape of a sphere.

Art and science

Apart from the desert biome, the forest biome is also about done, and the ice one will come along, hopefully to be added into the game by next week. For the time being, the textures are still simple gradients, but they will receive some more love and attention later on. The first character has been modeled too! Meet the grumpy scientist, who will be commenting on the player’s every action: Apart from pure modeling, something else has happened too, albeit mostly a lot more subtle. The artists have been playing around with shaders, resulting in the base shading (as in, actual shadowing) we want to use. Toon shading! If you don’t know what that is, take another look at the picture of the scientist, but now look at the rocks. See the shadow bands? That is toon shading. While it still is a WIP, as this one has some very rough edges, it gives a good feeling of what we want to achieve style-wise. The last shader that has been made, and that’s less subtle, is this one: Sorry, no moving image as the size was a bit too big (about 8 times what itchio accepts - heh), but trust us when we say that it moves, and looks amazing. This is the shader for the core of the planet, which will gradually become more visible as more tiles break off.

Next up

It is the goal to have all the currently empty functions filled up. This will not implement every behaviour and quirk yet, but will be enough to give the complete basis of the gameplay. Then we also want to add the bomb again, so the tiles can break and give that little more “I need to watch out” feeling to the game. On top of that, a very basic upgrade system should be in the game by next week.
As for the art, we hope to get all biomes in the game, and have player and at least one enemy as WIP on top of the scientist.