Project Quantum Game Dev Diary — Jan. 17, 2022 — Jason Tennent
Welcome to the new year everybody! We sincerely hope you’ve had a great holiday season and are as ready as we are to go into 2022 with guns blazing. Apologies for the absence of dev blogs. There hadn’t been much work done over the holiday period because, as you could imagine, we were on holiday…
However, we’re now two weeks deep into the new year so let’s have a look at what has transpired across our design, programming and art.
Design:
- Network Server Testing
- Spear Charge Rework
- Regression Testing
Fun stuff first, we’ve had to rework a core part of how spear weapons will function. As well as being able to attack and block, the spear weapon can charge up and launch the character forward and deal more damage depending on the time charged (to a maximum). This was initially implemented in the same movement component as our other character movement elements which lead it to inadvertently affect other parts of the character's movement when we tweaked how the spear charge operated.
The main area of concern was that increasing the air friction gradually when the charge ended also increased the air friction when the player jumps. So for the spear charge mechanic to feel right, other parts had to suffer — which obviously we can’t have. With that, the programming team has been working to separate the components. The character slow will affect the cast, but not the other elements.
Programming:
- Spear Charge Rework
- Camera Bone Fixes
- Bug Fixing and Resolving
Most of our programming team only came back to work on the 10th of January, so they’ve not been at full capacity for too long. They somehow still got a fair chunk of work done. As discussed above, the programming side and design side worked together to rework the Spear Charge function.
We had also found a number of issues with how the Camera bone of our character skeleton worked with the animations. This resulted in the player camera acting erratically or just moving erroneously during certain animations. As you could imagine, these bugs were shifted fairly high in the priority order. Unless you enjoy motion sickness, in which case you can submit your suggestion to the #suggestions channel on our Discord server.
Art:
- Player state animations
- SMG Modelling and Texturing
- Revive Animations
- Spear Movement Animations
With most of (if not all) the player state animations finished, our animator has been working on a Revive animation. We’re really happy with it as a first iteration and are moving to implement it in its current state.
Our third original weapon has been made and is ready to be implemented. The SMG weapon continues our theming of sci fi-modifications and looks gorgeous. The piping and bolts enhance our Seeker style mod-shop feel. The muzzle and coils around the front of the weapon bring up that sci-fi feel, without it wandering into the high sci-fi realms.
I hope you all had a relaxing holiday period and may 2022 be your best year yet.
Thank you for reading,
Jason Tennent, Design Director
If you’d like to get in on our AAA game well before its release date, I’d like to welcome you to our Discord here
