Polish

I'll start off with an apology for the extremely late blog post for anyone who's keeping up to date with the project - since the lock down my workflow has slowed down a lot for numerous reason that I shan't bore you with. I do however have some stuff to show!

Level 2 is fully set dressed now! Lighting is also almost complete, alongside the collision pass. I did ponder extending the level some more, but before I went in that direction I decided to make sure everything else was polished, specifically within the player, and thankfully I made this decision as I've been a tyrant for bug fixing the last few days. You know how it goes, fix one thing, break another.

Before I get into that boring stuff, find some screenshots of the level below!

The first thing I had to do was rebuild the player from scratch. There was a bug that involved the whole player rotating with the camera - imagine if every time you looked down you had to lean forward. I have no idea where this issue came from as it just kind of came from nowhere at some point. Rebuilding the player also allowed me some time to optimise and tidy up my blueprints to get things working as intended. So, I wasn't too largely hindered by this although it did take me 2 days to comb through it all - this was largely down to me double checking all my booleans and whether or not they were actually necessary now that the player mechanics are finalised.

After the seemingly endless circle of bug fixing I moved on to adding to my minimalist Heads up Display, which simply consists of a cross hair, a grapple icon that appears when you aim at a grapple-able surface, and a tint that is added to the screen when the player is boosted from the E-GRID.

I opted to edit the visuals of the E-GRID to maintain the fantasy aesthetic, and to colour the cable that fires when you grapple in a similar manner.

So, visually the game is pretty much finished unless I should happen to notice something a little further down the line. I have a couple of very simple level mechanics that still need implementing (collecting items), and I may choose to add some sort of cutscenes that will help to guide the player should I deem it fit, but beyond that Level 2 is at its end.

The next things I aim to tackle are sound implementation, followed by an extremely simple main menu just to allow players to edit certain options and to choose which level they would like to launch into (this will not be asset driven at all.

I'm happy to say that I'm nearly finished, it was beginning to feel as though the finish line was moving away from me.

Regarding this project, there will probably be only one more post when everything is finished.

Thanks for reading! Trav.