We're just a week away from having our first playable prototype and we're super excited by the way it's shaping up! Similarly to my last post, this might be shorter or more general, but the content covered incude some of the most important aspects of signalling/feedback and being able to complete a gameloop with a majority of the mechanics in place. We've put a ton of work lately into the core systems, the acquisition of items and their effects, various parameters of level, obstacle and enemy generation, and basic functionality of different menus.

In my last post I mentioned we were able to configure the elevator and how it'll mostly work for taking the player up or down and into new areas. We integrated this into the procedural level generation and replaced the plain room the player was spawning in before. This works out nicely too because when the player uses the elevator to proceed down further into the Abyss, the elevator will assume the same location in the same type of room and the rest of the room generation will work identically. We also spruced up some of the prefabs we were using for the rooms and in the rooms to better handle certain types of collision (for instance, the collider of the chest was blocking bullets from passing when shot past at a specific angle).

As far as visuals go, an absolute major addition has been some of the HUD graphics that display the players health, ammo, and other abilities. A few weeks ago we implemented the minimap and icons to represent the player, chests and other points of interest on it, and this has just been stylized with a nice border. There is also an equipment slot on the bottom left of the screen that will house the icon of whatever equipment the player currently has active. The most important element however is probably the combination ammo/health bar at the top left of the screen. This obviously shows the players health as the green bar, descending to the left revealing red when receiving damage. The two revolver chambers on the left of that show how much ammo the player has in total and do an animated spin action as the bullets are fired and when reloading. The final component to this graphic is the glowing red gem right below the health that is our parry indicator. This is illuminated when Grace is able to perform the parry and will go out once it's triggered. The cooldown is a few seconds so part of our ongoing improvements include better signalling and feedback with these graphics and their audio cues.

Next week is a big week for us with the release of our First Playable prototype, so stay tuned!