Hello everyone!

This week, we worked on prototyping different scenarios of Through the Misty Gate. We developed four different prototypes: a Heal spell, a simple attack spell, the movement script, and some basic enemy AI. We also designed the Ruins, which will be the first area of the game, and the player character, who has a really cool cape. Seriously, look at it. It's cool.

          The main character                                         The background for the Ruins

Paulina worked on the simple attack spell prototype. She has started to implement the spell mechanics, along with Afonso, which should soon allow the player to cast any spell in their repertoire. She developed a scenario where the player must shoot a series of targets, and the idea of her prototype is to help us understand what projectile characteristics (such as projectile speed, size, rate of fire, etc)  work and which don't.

Afonso worked on the Heal spell and the player's health bar, trying to make it clear when the player should heal and when they shouldn't. Health bars are an important feature to get correctly: if they're not well designed, confusions might happen in the heat of the moment. Afonso also implemented different versions of the Heal spell, such as a regeneration effect and a burst heal. These should also help us balance combat in future and will give us options moving forward.

Tiago developed the movement script. He tested different speeds and jumping heights for the player to try and achieve what we feel is the most natural way of moving around - there will be a lot of that throughout the game, so it's a vital feature to get right. We haven't reached a conclusion yet, but his testing has definitely pushed us in the right direction, and was invaluable in the rest of the prototypes, too.

I worked on the basic enemy AI, as well as a few different enemy attack and movement patterns. For example, I have developed a simple enemy that will simply try to attack the player at close range by moving straight to them when they spot them. I also worked on a flying enemy that does much the same thing but, as the name suggests, flies. A standard ranged enemy is currently in development, too. These few, almost stereotypical enemies will be the basis for all the enemies going forward; it's important to know how they behave when idle, what their vision range is, what their possible attacks are... this simple framework will hopefully help us develop interesting and challenging enemies in future.

The character can jump around!

That's all for this week! Thank you for reading this far, and I'll see you next week!

-- Rodrigo