Welcome to devblog six! Thanks for being patient guys on this one guys. Devblog #5 spanned 2 weeks due to the previous week having some internal problems that slowed development. That’s the reason this blog is out today rather than last monday. Going forward we should be back to regular monday releases!
Under The Hood
Let’s get the boring stuff out of the way. We have recently started revamping how we handle the menu and UI, implementing a new controller with an updated settings manager, an asset made by Luke. If you’re a developer, you can check out his setting’s manager here: Settings Manager – Unity Asset Store. It’s saved us a ton of time and it pretty much handles every kind of graphics/audio setting you could imagine. Alongside that, we have also been going through and tweaking settings, batching objects etc to help squeeze some more perfomance out; this is usually something we would save for the beta version but we feel doing some now will save us time later on.
Now, onto something a little more visual. We have started to revamp the maze to make it more organic. During our test plays, we realised that a lot of the time you were completely lost, which is not particularly a bad thing for a maze, but it does make it very hard to get back on the right path again. I believe we had spoken about various “landmarks” in a past devblog, but if not, our plan is to include various points of interest we are coining as landmarks. These will be aimed at helping the player figure out where they are, where they need to go or at least, where they have been. These landmarks will include interactables and puzzles, so they are definitely worth exploring. While landmarks provide a great way of figuring out where you are, you still need to find the landmark itself. To help with this, we are reworking the maze to feel less “square”, for example, see the below images.
This will make the maze more varied and a little less confusing. Don’t worry though, not all of the maze is getting revamped to the new style so there will be areas that are still difficult to navigate for all you maze-loving lab rats out there!
Art Of Jonny
This seems to be a popular part to our devblogs and rightly so! Last week, several people had taken interest in the bridge painting. This week, we feel Jonny has really gone above an beyond in his attempt to capture the emotion and bleakness of a dark forest. This will be for a later section of the game.
Take a rest and relax
You may have noticed the stone slabs in the aerial images of the maze above. These are actually benches that Lonnie whipped up. There will be lots of small props to help break up the endless hedges that can also, like the landmarks, be used to navigate the maze. We will release a little more of the reason certain objects end up in the maze at a later date, but let’s just say there may be a few that give you a little bit of a surprise.
Yes, that is the lantern, albeit a little buggy with the grasp! We have been hard at work getting the lantern to look and feel right. Lots of back and forths with playtests, making sure key areas are visible. It’s still not ready for a fair comparison, but most of the team prefers it over the flashlight so far!
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