Hello everyone!!

We can actually introduce you all to a named game now! Say hello to Tower Tricksters! As mentioned last week we had a few names up in the air, but we ultimately felt that this name in particular stuck the best, and conveyed the identity of the game the best!

Programming

The programmers have been going crazy on the prototypes, the movement of previous just didn't feel there yet so we improved a bit on it, when grabbing a block it no longer rotates physics based around the grabbing point but now you can control it yourself giving more control to the player. With a control this is just done using the D-pad but with the wii remote u physically rotate the remote for a 1:1 rotation making it feel like rotating a real block. And yes I know the wii remote looks shaky, I overdid my movement a bit to make it clearer in the gif plus it's a prototype, there is still a lot of room for fine tuning it.

XBox Controller

Wii Controller

But this isn't everything we did this week, we also added POWERUPS giving more gameplay which equals MORE FUN.

Sadly enough all this didn't just work the first time we tried it, unity was a real pain about a lot of things this week, here a small summary about the things we cried about:

• The bluetooth connection with the wii controller didn’t like working anymore
• Perforce(our source control) didn’t mention the check out, this meant one of our programmers had to rewrite a part of his code because of merge conflict ).
• Constant TCP version control errors, that didn’t really do anything but were really annoying 
• Unity not recognizing a destroyed object giving some fancy result

All these and some more small things resulted in a total of…. 37 crashes.

No worries tho, because in the end it all worked out and the current prototype should work with all the new mechanics mentioned above.

Art

The art team has been slaving away with great conviction at both an art bible, and a technical document; all in all laying the groundwork for crafting a space with a delightful visual distinction.

The technical document covers the, surprise, techy aspects of production, and is intended to be a document that every developer on the team is expected to have read, before being ready to contribute to the development of the game. This means that we have been fleshing out pipelines and defined production terms, the most interesting of which we will be breaking down here.

One of the key features that will be driving our artstyle is the fact that we will be texturing everything off the same 64x64 gradient atlas, which will hopefully lead to a performant game and a visually coherent artstyle.

The shader we are running in unity, apart from being pixelated as you've seen in earlier devlogs, can take a noise texture as a parameter, and triplanar project it onto any object, to break up colors for more visual interest. We plan to make these noise textures in Substance Designer, to have some deliciously edible noise textures that we can overlay our assets for some nice visual interest. Here’s how it looks with and without the noise overlay.

This week we made a lot of progress so please feel free to download the latest prototype, play it with friends or family and leave your thoughts and feelings about your experience in the comments. We would be more than happy to read them.

Next week, we should finally go in actual development with the game. That means we will be rewriting the whole game from the ground up with the knowledge we gathered the last few weeks during prototyping.