Alpha build
Last week was Alpha presentation, where we showed Symbiosis to a jury of testers for more in-depth feedback, and another playtest session is scheduled for this friday before the beta presentation next week. We have, to put it short, our hands full. I will thus not go into very much detail on my recent work, and instead give you a short update on the project.
Screenshot of Symbiosis in it's current state
The greatest gameplay change since the pre-alpha has been the implementation of the lifebond - a feature acting as a health bar, movement limitation and aestethic touch. It takes the form of a twisted twig with glowing orbs(as can be seen in the attached screenshots), each orb representing a life that the main characters Terra and Lumi share. Furthermore, when the distance between the characters increase, the life bond will begin to stretch and eventually snap, killing the characters and respawning them at the latest checkpoint.
This is to emphasize the bond between Lumi and Terra, forcing the player to keeping them together in their challenges.
When Terra and Lumi move apart, the camera zooms out and the Life Bond is streched.
Another big improvement has been on the graphical side, where we have been hard at work implementing assets and experimenting with lighting to get a look representative of the final product. On my side, this has meant keeping a constant dialouge with the team's artists to ensure that the assets are used correctly and don't interfere with the artistical goals we have. Assets such as trees, branches, foilage, stones, mushrooms and basic terrain has been imported, textured and hand placed on the map - all under the all-seeing eye of the art team.
There was one major problem where most models had been exported as .obj files instead of the ideal .fbx, which caused me to replace every assets in the already built level just a couple of days before the Alpha presentation. This caused some crunching on my part, which is something we could have avoided had we known about the advantages of .fbx-files beforehand. Even though, the graphical upgrade from pre-alpha to alpha was a major one and we recieved very positive feedback for this from the Alpha jury.
Aside from the improved graphics and the implementation of the life bond, there has been extensive bug fixing, iteration on mechanics and one or two cuts in features. For this friday's playtest, I will move on from platforming and movement and focus on the puzzle aspect of the game. After that we will have a feature freeze, and hopefully be able to focus on polish from next week up until Gotland Game Conference on the 21st of this month.
Hype!
