We've officially wrapped up our first sprint! Most of this sprint consisted of catching up on what we were supposed to achive in the class game jam. We dropped Anala's transformation mechanic for now and focused on building an interesting level and movement mechanics that were fun to play. Our artists also cranked out some beautiful environment art and character animations that added a lot to the game.

Our class demo was a solid success. I knew we had done well when the TA's face expressed excitement each time she performed one of the parkour moves for the first time. The professor had positive things to say as well. More than once he said "This is more than I was expecting," and I think I'll remember that for a long time. They had several notes for improvements or bugfixes, but they said that overall it was fun. The TA said we may be close to meeting the requirements for our playable pre-alpha assignment, which isn't due until the end of September.

A map snippet featuring a new tilemap by Jake

We're doing our best not to get complacent. Sprint 2 will be focused on making the enemies better and more adaptive. Currently they're just goons who can notice and shoot at you. We'll also be refining the parkour to make it feel even better, and hopefully making our stealth mechanics more robust. If all goes well we're also going to implement an opening cutscene and a tutorial!

We will likely start uploading playable builds soon. It may be best to wait until the official pre-alpha is ready, but I'm looking forward to player feedback. For now, here's a video of Luke speedrunning our demo level in about 16 seconds. You miss out on a lot of the level design but it shows how fast and smooth the movement can be for an experienced player.

Today's inspiration music is Kronos by Alpine Universe.