Devlog 5: The sacrificing continued

Welcome back friends and game enthousiasts for yet another week of babies and sacrificing.

As promised, this week would see a whole lot more of defining our game mechanics, enhancing the environment and making our characters.

Just like every week, I will not waste your time, so let's dive right in~!

Programming

This week, we made solid progress on our UI logic! We successfully added health bars that actually work unlike our earlier attempts during prototyping. Nice to make it work this time. We also implemented win and lose conditions, meaning the game now has a complete gameplay loop where you can successfully summon your God or lose to the peasants . 

All the UI elements we created are currently placeholder user widgets, and we’re excited to swap them out for our artist’s final UI designs down the line. 

On the gameplay side, we refined enemy behavior, making them easier to dodge while still keeping the challenge intact. We also began implementing enemy spawners, which now generate enemies in groups and gradually ramp up the intensity. As the game progresses, dodging won’t be enough you’ll be forced to face swarms of relentless peasants to secure those important baby sacrifices for your God. Things are shaping up, and we can’t wait to share more soon!

Environment

For the environment we tried to really define the playing field, adding variation in our terrain with a river, different height islands and finnishing off the background. Further completing our material gives us the chance of easily painting our landscape, making it easy for us to ittirate on multiple ideas. This also gives our player a clear path to go on.

Since adding the islands we also ran into the trouble of players being outof sight, this was an easy fix by adding transparency when the camera gets close to the object.

One final touch is the addition of some vegetation, on which we are currently also working

Characters

For the enemy character this week, we finished the model by combining all previous made assets and adapting them were needed. After this we worked on how to rig this character in mixamo. This was a bit harder than expected since this model does not have a standard human form, with the main problem being that the neck and head are placed in front of the body and that the legs are shorter then normal which makes the spine longer.

After getting to a decent rig and poly paint, we looked for which animations fit this character the best with the least deformation. We found a fitting animation for the walking, attack and death cycle, as you can see in the video. 

Lastly, we started converting these animations with our sprite converter.

Our sacrifices also started to get some more shape. We chose the baby design we thought would fit the game best and then iterated on some clothes and hairstyles that would fit both the babies but also match our villagers/ enemies. 

For the main player characters, just like how we discussed it previous week about our enemies. The main characters also deserve research and sketches to design them. Unlike the sillouthes method, We went for more detail to give some more characteristics to the players. Choosing between a normal classic cloak. A few hats where the shadow of the bottom still gives the dark effect so no face is seen. And maybe double points to give the sillouthe of an jester almost.



Next up we had to decide on the player characters staff that also acts like the light that illuminates the player. For this one as well we went with a more detailed approach of sketches. We now are finished.

And thats all for today folks, next week like every week now, will see much of the same. further enhancing what we have and finally implementing those characters.

Kind regards, 

The SacriFetus team~!