Brawsome!

We’ve gotten back into the swing of things after our trip from GDC, and it has been a busy but productive week. Just take a look at the image below, which, as I’m sure you know, is a work in progress and does not represent the final game:

So yeah! Check that out! Pretty cool, huh?

What do you mean, nothing’s changed? I guess I’ll have to explain why this image is so cool then. As you can see, there are three test batteries, as well as white block on the top which represents the slot the battery is supposed to go onto (it’ll be more clear when it has proper art). Put the battery onto the slot, and the door to the left gets power, so you can open it. There are also four different pads which allow you to transform between Lucas and his Wolf persona (two of them only do one-way transformations). Why is this all so cool? This room, right now, basically contains the primordial soup of our gameplay! It’s our mechanic in its most primitive form.

You see, while it seems pretty simple, a few minor changes make things a bit trickier. Only the Wolf is strong enough to push the battery around. And when active, the door will only respond to Lucas’ touch on the hand scanner (which you will see on the proper door art). So, you can only solve the puzzle by using both characters! The next step, of course, is to do what puzzles do best, and complicate matters further by adding obstacles. And oh boy do we have those. However, we wouldn’t want to give away everything. But it’s great that we’ve got this functionality, because from here, we can start doing more fun and complex things.

Back from GDC! However, as is typical when you get back from a trip, work didn’t really start happening until Thursday, when we had a meeting about art style, or more specifically, animation, tilesets, and our plans for cutscenes. Seeing as the most detailed work has been done on tilesets, I’ll talk about those.

As we’re making a top-down game, one of the tricky things to get right is perspective. If you go back and look at a top-down Zelda game (or any top-down game, really), you’ll notice that the perspectives are all over the place. In a single room of a dungeon, you’ll see that the walls are leaning inward, characters have kind of got a 45 degree view when looked from front or back, but walk absolute left or right, some objects are birds-eye view, while others are completely out of proportion to anything else. The closer you look at it, the more “wrong” it all seems. But! When you play it as a game, it all comes together.

So you have to get that balance between getting perspective correct, but not at the expense of the player not understanding what they’re supposed to be doing, or whether they can interact with an object. This image is early and does not represent the final game! Now, let’s have a look at it:

Here, there are some important things to take into account:

There’s more stuff that we’re aware of too, but these are just a few points. The tough thing is making sure the art looks nice, but not at the expense of confusing the player.

Another week has gone by, and of course, more progress has been made. Stuff like room-to-room transitions, object pushing and collision have gone into the game (as well as some basic UI tests and functionality) but unfortunately, this is never really exciting to show. Our artists have been working hard on the look of the characters, and we’re mighty pleased on how they’re turning out. So rather than waffle on like I normally do, here’s a picture of Lucas when he’s transformed into his wolf form: