Week 10 - Reach For the Summit

This week, we made great progress in almost finishing all of the important elements needed for the beta build of our game. The level design is getting close to finalized, all of the enemies are implemented, the animations are almost finished, and we started getting some of the sound stuff done.

With the level design, the design for Ember's Rise was completed, and work on Vermillion Summit has begun. Ember's Rise introduces the players to swinging platforms, a new platforming challenge. These platforms swing from one point to another and the player has to carefully time their jumps while they are on them. The path you take through Ember's Rise depends on where you entered it from the Tower Base area. This area also gives players the Fireball and Spin Attack abilities, the latter of which is necessary for progression.

After this, planning for the Vermillion Summit began. It's the final area in the Tower of Ash and is planned to be the most difficult. The general pathing of the area is designed in a way where you can enter from any side of Ember's Rise, but it will eventually converge to the boss room at the very top. This final area also grants players the Double Jump ability, because we deemed that ability to be the strongest as it lets players skip a lot of earlier parts of the game.

As a final platforming challenge, we are also introducing falling platforms. If the player stands on one of these, it will count down briefly before making the player fall down. This will mean the player has to constantly keep moving otherwise they will have to keep trying.

Next, the final enemies were created for the game. These enemies being Satan's Eye, the Black Marble Golem, the Lost Ember, and the Hollow Robes. The latter three enemies belong to the Vermillion Summit, and so they are the most unique to fight.

For animations, the majority of boss animations were created, to match each of its moves in the moveset. After consideration from the initial idle pose, we figured it would be much better if the boss had more of a warrior stance, so that its status would be more clear to the player. Then from there, the animations were adapted from the sketches of the moveset that were created early into the semester.

For the next week, we will be pooling all our remaining resources to get as much of the final assets and gameplay done as possible so that we can submit a proper beta build to test. The majority of the work will be dedicated to finishing the level design, implementing the final animations, and making bug fixes. All polishing for the game will be done in the weeks after the beta build is finished. In general, things are shaping up to be a pretty fun game but we still have a lot of work ahead of us.

Until next time.