Devlog #2: Character Concepts, Parrying, and More

Hello! Welcome to Week 2 of Salt, Grooves, and Garlic development.

This week, our concept artist Heron created these concepts for our main character!

In the end, as a team decided we liked this design the most.

We discussed adding some musical elements to the character designs for the boss and the player. For example, maybe we could give the vampire boss an electric guitar, or have the player wield a fiddle or a lute. In the end, we decided that we liked the idea of having the boss wield some sort of instrument, but the player character’s musical elements could be a bit more subtle.

The earbuds idea is certainly not final but we thought it was funny.

We worked on a bunch of new features this week. The boss has new AI, new attack patterns, and a placeholder model. Pickups also now spawn on the grid, which can be collected to send an automatic attack towards the boss (the exact behaviour of the pickups is subject to change)

We also added the foundation for the parrying system, which forces the player to make block inputs with a complex rhythm in order to avoid damage. The attacks are sent out and blocked in sync with the music, with a call and response composition.

(At the moment the attacks look like they miss, but the idea is that they damage you no matter where you are on the board, unless you parry with the correct timing.)

Some other things we worked on:

• A sample of a new music track being worked on, which can be listened to in the tech demo video
• Improving our rhythm/beat manager system
• Creating a system to load files that define beat/timestamps of attacks/events into the game, to allow designers to edit timings in sync with the music
• Adding a pause feature, which is more complicated than usual due to the audio needing to be synced perfectly after you unpause