First 10 days in the development

DAY ONE:

 November 5th 2018

We want to make a survival horror, like the classic Resident Evil, but since we're working with a 2d engine, we need to make some changes in the game mechanics.

WHAT WE WILL IMPLEMENT:

- Multiple endings

- 2 different characters

- choices that change the events in the game

- Puzzle to solve.

- Game Controls like the Resident Evil ones (no mouse, gamepad friendly)

- Well characterized pre-rendered backgrounds

- Limited resources (few ammo and medi-kits)

- Two selectable characters

WHAT WE WANT TO IMPLEMENT:

- Dubbing

- Old style FMV

We started the development choosing the best way to represent our ideas. 

Many times adding features that seem essential can be a tedious job, so we had to choose wisely what to take in and what to leave out. 
For example, we want to give to the Player the chance to choose between two playable characters. 
At the beginning, we also wanted to leave the non-selected character in the game, to help the Player but, since we have less than 4 weeks to complete the whole prototype, we decided not to do it.

After that, we put out the story pipeline on paper, laying out the key events of the game. The first part of the game will be linear, than the Player will have the freedom to choose where to go and what to do, deciding what will happen in the game.

DAY 2 to 5:

November 6th - 9th  2018

After the game concept, we started working on the character design. Here we encountered a few problems:

FIRST: PLAYER MOVEMENT

We're using construct 2 to make this prototype because, for us, it is the best way to have a functional game in the short term. We chose this engine even if we are aware that implementing complicated mechanics in construct 2 can be hard. 
We want the Player to be able to rotate the character without using the mouse. in order to do it, we used the eight-directions behaviour (so the Player will have to use only the keyboard or the gamepad). Using this behaviour gave us only eight different animation angles, which on a 360° movement, as you can see in the gif below, was really bad. Also, it was hard to understand where the player was aiming.

    8-directions  20-directions

To have 20 different angles (instead of 8)  we fixed our code. 

This gave our player a sort of 3D effect when spinning.

SECOND: PLAYER ANIMATIONS

The player movement led us to the second main issue: the number of animations.

We're using Blender to model, animate and render our characters. That's not a problem since I (the writer) have some experience with this software. The problem is another: we had to render our character from 20 different angles, which requires a lot of rendering time!

For example: The idle animation, initially, was made of 10 frames (not so much) and the resolution of the main character was 200x200 px. So we have to render 10 frames * 20 angles at 20-30 seconds per frame. TOTAL: More or less an hour for a complete animation. If you multiply this value for all the animations in the game you will get at the end of the Game-Jam with only a single completed character.

This is why we had to cut out a lot of frames from the animations (now the idle animation is just one frame) and reduce the characters resolution.

This allowed us to render a single frame in 4-6 seconds

BUT thanks to the time saved we were able to add some new animations 

DAY  6-7 

November 10th-11th 2018

Once we had the right resolution and animation for the character, we needed an environment.

As I said, we're using Blender for the game graphics. We wanted nice and detailed pre-rendered backgrounds. We started to think "What could be the best camera angle for our game? An isometric one? A perspective angle? Or maybe an Orthographic one?". So…why don't use all of them?

Isometric:

Ortographic

Perspective

DAY  8 - 10

November 12th- 15th

From day 8 to the end of the week (day 12) we will work on the backgrounds and the environment while updating some game mechanics like the flashlight and the real-time shadow system