Category «English»

Friedrich:
I was able to continue with the story of chapter 7, but I'm a bit slow. Big part of the reason is that there are so many other things to do. As everything in the game is still WIP, nothing feels really finished. But I added autosaves to various parts of the levels and story (this was user feedback), made a few shaders mostly for the foliage Patrick created, implemented a card slot that lets you destroy cards during friendly matches, etc.
As we use Godot's posterisation effect to reduce the amount of colours based on a palette per level, some characters look a bit strange when the player meets them outside their usual habitat. So I added a functionality to tint a character depending on the current palette, and now the troll looks a bit less sickish in the first level ... Another issue that was in the back of my head a long time also concerned NPCs switching places - as the player can decorate the dungeon pretty freely, it could happen that a character would spawn inside a chair for example. I (hope I) fixed this by just hiding nearby decorations temporarily.
Also the Kamis are back, kind of. I reused some code that we used in TRI for little flying entities, this time for a visual effect only in the swamp level.

Jana:
This week was quite turbulent, at least planning-wise. We made a couple of decisions about looking for other financing options to finish the game, creating a marketing plan, and deciding on the month M&M will be released. Now that we're getting closer, our project feels more and more like something that's worth spending more time on - but the money will eventually run dry, and as we approach our third year of development, we're also eager to work on something different.
Our main focus right now is still the last level. Like everyone else, I did my part by creating an old Dwarven mechanism. Also there is still the design overhaul of every screen concerning the cards - and some more. Let's just say there are still places in the UI that haven't received any love yet. We had some good design discussions this week – I’d say it’s a good sign things get polished – though we still need to test a lot!

Patrick:
In the other levels very often we use just regular wood ladders. For this level I made the next evolutionary step for them and turned them into rope ladders. But you have to lower them at first. It's basically a shortcut.
I also modeled and textured some little water lilies for the swamp which Friedrich then (with his magic shader abilities) let them move on the surface of the swamp.
And I made some nice waterfalls. But for these I myself got the hands dirty on the (visual) shader programming. Was fun.

Friedrich:
I couldn't work on the main story these days, as small stuff piled up - for example, when switching from decoration mode back to normal exploration, sounds potentially would get cut off. So I finally fixed that, while also implementing several WAV files our sound artist Florian sent us. For muffled step sounds on carpets I had to add logic for recognising different surfaces and not just floor tiles. Moreover I now try to preload more assets that get instantiated during the game, hopefully there will be less unwanted stutter in the future, e.g. when using the inspection mode.
Other than that I fixed a few bugs that became obvious while doing some work on the UI for the card combat. The big portion of card fights is still missing, and that will mean a lot of balancing. Which is why I added a new stats screen that will appear after a "normal fight" (a persistent card fight where destroyed cards don't respawn on a retry). The stats screen shows which cards got removed, and which ones the player earned. This way it is clearer now that you can/should return after replenishing your health cards ... Of course, the UI design is still a work-in-progress.

Jana:
Hello and welcome to Mops & Mobs. Be my guest. Another week, another try. But remember, work or die!! This week we did lots of planning (again!), trying to make decisions regarding the release of the game and potential partners. The closer we get to the finish line, the harder it is to bring people we collaborate with aboard. Therefore we make lists with pros and cons – its mind-numbing and feels like you can only do wrong.
Or we just re-design the interface! The card game didn’t get to look like the rest of the game yet, so I work on a new card and battle screen design.

Patrick:
I built a cool little handcar this week! In German it's called a “Draisine,” but that sounds kinda like a French cooking technique. Besides of that I started to decorate the swamps a bit more with trees, mushrooms and swamp grass.

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