With three weeks between us and the launch of the demo, we’ve had a chance to get and process some helpful feedback on the game. We’ve also been doing a lot of background work, R&D, and planning. Also, we have two new people on our little volunteer team! Aaron has joined to help with audio stuff, and Marissa will be helping with the writing! As always, it’s super encouraging when people say they want to help out.
Bryan has been working hard on making some improvements to the flight system, to hopefully make colliding with surfaces a bit less punishing, as well as provide more opportunities for movement. If you crash into the ground at a steep angle now, there will be a little “poof” of dust, and you’ll land. If you collide with the ground at a shallow angle, you’ll automatically start skimming along the surface, which is a lot of fun! If you “jump” when you collide with a surface, you can kick off of it and deflect away with a small speed boost.
Bryan has also put a lot of work into getting automatic builds of the game working! He set up a build server on a spare laptop of his using Jenkins to trigger a build whenever Perforce gets a commit, and it’s then packaged and sent to Itch.io via Butler. Having a continuous integration/delivery system up and running is really cool. Now we just need to get some good Unit tests set up. 🙂
We’ve started working on Island #2, but mostly there’s been a lot of R&D into what’s feasible, and looks good. The idea is for the level to be one enormous tree, floating in the sky. The technical challenges around that are many. The tree is absolutely massive, but the player can still fly in close, and part of the level will take place inside it. So it needs to feel like a tree up close, but then not look too hideous or repetitive from a distance. The solution at the moment is to make pieces of bark and place them on the surface of the tree like “foliage”. The downside is that the bark only aligns vertically, so it wouldn’t work for a very bendy tree.
Still lots more testing to do before we finalize a look though.
Join our Discord if you want to stay more involved, and give feedback! https://discord.gg/JEjteYe