Dev Log 1 - Team 5

22 / 5 / 2024

Michael Poulos, Theo Huang, Nehchal Kalsi, Kevin Le, June Oh, Noah S, Henry Bezerra, Ethan Micallef, Griffin Hook

What have we done so far?

The team started working on the game last Saturday at the Jam. During that time, we were able to concept our character, camera, and control systems. We decided that the character the player controls is a sock. This sock can turn into a ball or other shapes and can be used for moving and jumping to play. Players may build up an electric charge by rubbing themselves against carpets. The player's way of attacking will be through electric shock after enough of a charge is built. We also considered designing some enemies in the levels to enrich our gameplay. In addition, we also finished setting up our Itch.io and invited all team members. We created the initial creative brief together in a 3 hour meeting, where everyone actively participated and provided many valuable ideas. Most surprisingly, our programmers refined the initial prototype and made two amazing builds invaluable to our design and development. 

Following the creative brief meeting, our programmers and designers were able to complete the following:

• Improved movement
  • Physics-based ball roll mode
  • Crouch

• Improved enemies
  • Added cockroach and dust bunnies
  • Animations on hit-and-kill

• Added
  • UI (objective, health)
  • Early character model

• The player can now only charge on carpet material

What are our next steps?

The team is still working with a few new ideas for how the player will move and what abilities they’ll have. At this stage, we should be making our final choices for what to include in our game. One ability that has always been intended to be implemented is the player’s shock ability. As for how that ability will be designed and implemented, we are not 100% sure yet. We must make some final design choices soon and get our programmers to work implementing them. 

What are important discoveries we’ve made along the way?

We realized that we have a lot of creative freedom with how we choose to design the player character. There are a lot of different ways we can transform and manipulate the player character to make the experience feel very unique. We realized that many of our ideas were out of scope, including the dust bunny boss and much of the game's attention toward combat. We realized that our focus should be on the player character and their interactions with the game environment rather than combat.