Weekly Dev Log #2

This week we focused on making a simple level for the Tech Demo. The level supports up to 4 players with keyboard and gamepad support in local splitscreen co-op. In the level, the players are set in the control room complex inside of the humanoid robot. Their task for this tech demo is to coordinate between the two hands and the head to pick up and swipe on a dating app on their phone.

Players have access to the head room which controls the eyes of the robot as well as the left and right arms which now feature holograms of the arms for a better understanding of their position and rotations if no one is looking through the eyes. We are looking to explore including extra sensory information surrounding this arm hologram so players can see approximations of objects around them even if the eyes are not active (This would be a limited form of passive vision where general shapes and positions of objects in a limited radius surrounding the arm are communicated. Inspiration from this comes from games like Scanner Sombre that produce a low resolution point cloud or lidar effect).

Adding the task of swiping the phone has helped us to identify how the co-op gameplay feels with the current limb control mechanics. One of our observations is we don't want one player to be stuck on the eye terminal the entire game. We looked at adding a blinking mechanic that would require a player to leave the eye terminal periodically however we are still experimenting with the right visual cues for this.

Unlike the previous week, we didn't include an emergency event that required the player to enter the limbs. While this is an important part of our game, we need to do more work to smooth out the limb interior experience, especially when the limb is moving to ensure the player can walk through and doesn't clip through the walls (both visually or physically).

Looking forward we are looking at including legs (robot) movement, emergency events, and a walkable (robot) environment. We are also looking at implementing an arm mechanic where the hand shoots out of the wrist to launch forward for grabbing items (some motivation is we want the player to be able to have more reach than what a human arm realistically provides. Additionally, having a harder to control mechanic complements the fine arm control we currently have and enables more slippery octodad esque movement challenges)