Good Day Gentlefolk!

I am pleased to announce that we have completed the prototype stage of our project and now move towards the vertical slice. This sprint took an extra week as college assignments ramped up across the whole team, so we agreed to delay the sprint an extra week!.

So what does this mean for the game?. Well with with the prototype done we can now test and show off the core features of our game. With some variety of enemies, weapons and procedurally generated levels, there is a lot to talk about.

First up, the player. Our player character has been fully prototyped with functioning movement, weapons and dashing. This means players can hop into the game, run around and test out all of their mechanics. Our movement is fixed to a 2d plane with no vertical elements involved as is standard for the top-down genre. The player can hold two weapons at a time, and fire them both separately or at the same time. The dash allows players a quick burst of speed as they dodge away from danger and keep up with the high paced combat.

And of course, no shooter is complete without a host of evil little buggers to fight off. Our game now has 3 unique enemies to hassle our players to no end, a basic shooting enemy, a bomber and a shield drone. We have a fully modular enemy behavior setup such that making new enemies proves quite simple.

The shooting enemy is quite simple, it follows the player around shooting periodically at them, the real trouble starts however when the shield drone gets involved. This crafty little guy tends to hide behind its teammates while projecting a bonus health shield onto them, making the whole situation more difficult to deal with. Play testers report that the shield drone is exactly the right amount of annoying!!! In addition to this setup, bomber drones will be constantly diving at the players, forcing them to move around a lot to avoid going kaboom.

As for level generation, much of the code is complete allowing us to create completely random encounters, using a random room, objective, secondary objective and set of enemies for spawning. The very same code can allow for scripted encounters, allowing us to create unique and specific experiences curated by the devs for a more enjoyable experience.

That's all for now folks, catch you on the flip side