Weekly Dev Log #3 - Tech Proof of Concept

This week's progress was focused on Implementing and integrating all of the features of Elliot, our humanoid ship that our players control. This culminates in the Tech Proof of Concept Build attached to this dev log.

General Changes

We've changed our design to target a 3 player split screen environment with potential support for less than 3 players. We are keeping the splitscreen 4 panel format with the significant change being the 4th panel is reserved  for dialogue, ui, and Elliot's Eyes (the eyes that see  outside of the ship to the human world). Elliot's Eyes now take up the 4th panel and require a player to be controlling them to stay open (otherwise they will close as shown below).

                                                       Above, Eyes are closed.           Below, Eyes are open because Player 1 is interacting with the eye terminal

Grapple Arm

We added the ability to launch the hand off the player's arms for increased reach. The direction of the launch is controlled by the wrist rotation which the arm player has control over with their right stick. We intend for the player controlling the eyes to also control when  the hand is launched with their gamepad triggers. Giving the eye terminal player this control enables more coordination between players and gives more actions for the eye terminal player.

Walking

We've added and are cleaning up the ability to walk our robot around the human environment. We've gone with tank controls (left stick for left side force, right stick for right side force, both sticks for forward/reverse) for the leg movement controlled by 1 player so 1 player can move and steer the whole ship. We reduced the control down to 1 player as we felt like the walking wasn't going to be the main fun part of the game. We also reduced the control down to 1 player so that we could have 1 player for the head / eyes, 1 player for the arm, and 1 player for the legs.

Evidence Collection

We've introduced the main cross-level task for our game; Evidence Collecting involves using the arms to grab pieces of evidence that reveal our alien existence to the humans.  Players will use their arms to grab evidence in the human environment that comes out of Nova's belongings. This will be the primary task and score method in our game across  our levels. The thematic goal is to steal as much of this evidence from our date Nova as we can so humans do not find out about our existence.