The goal of these progress logs is to mark out the biggest features that have been added, changed, or removed. It won’t cover everything that was done, but it will cover anything major.
Nothing is set in stone, and during game development a lot of features will be re-designed or completely scraped over time due to many reasons. These dev logs provide a snapshot into what the game looks like at the time of writing them, and hold no promise of what will make it into the final product.
The focus of this month for our development in Lamina Island has been breaking apart the Island into level chunks, and creating the first pass for the are players are going to be spending the most time in, the Underground.
The way we are loading our levels got upgraded. We are basing it off of how unity did their open project level loading using unity’s addressable system. It is a pretty cool way of loading levels that is not dependent on build indexes, and since we are in the process of breaking 1 big generic level into many smaller but more personalized levels, our build indexes were changing too often to continue to be a basis for our level loading. It also gave us a chance to expand upon it & load a scene in the proper context, so if you entered the room from a specific side, it’d bring you to that side of the level you entered. Standard video game stuff that we did not have in our game until now.
The underground level was white boxed, and then fleshed out into our first pass implementation.
We added a placeholder for our shop keeper. At the moment, he’s just a pretty figure head, but eventually he will be the shopping point to spend all your gems to upgrade your underground.
And of course, a shop would be completely useless without gems to collect. So we added Gembot.
The idea behind Gembot, is that he will spawn in a random area each day, and if you find him, he will spray gems all over the place. He is shy however, and if you get too close to him, he will turtle up until you give him some space.
We also added the first implementation of our shadow cloud. The shadow cloud, chases players down and summon monsters in it’s wake.
And that wraps up our 10th month of development on Lamina Island
