FINAL DAY

It’s over!

Wow, the last two weeks have been a blur, but we’ve had a lot of fun making this wee game :)

We’re so excited to get it submitted and see what people think, and of course to play all the other submissions too!

For our final day, my main focus was on the intro cutscene. Inspired by the movie, each run opens with Val waking Earl up with his fake stampeding (though this is skippable so it doesn’t get tedious)

I also tied a basic tutorial into this system to hopefully guide players who don’t have me sitting over their shoulder telling them the goals and mechanics…

Other than that it’s just been tweaks, bug fixes, & polish!

Emmy made all the meeple have unique colours, which really helps distinguish them on the map :)

Meanwhile Caspar has been working on the final art, especially on the icons for the cards - which I think are looking amazing now! Check ‘em out below

Final polishing & fixing!

One more day!!!

Today has been me scrambling around responding to playtest feedback, fixing bugs, & polishing up the final state of things. Overall we’re still so happy with how far we’ve come in two weeks, it feels like a real game!

One of my focuses has again been the Graboid AI, as I try to make it tough but fair. I upped the speed of the Graboids but spawn them further away from the player, so after the initial calm they are pretty relentless in their chasing.

It’s still possible to distract them by alternating movement between different meeple in different segments of the map, but that’s kind of the theme of the movie so I think its fine here too ;)

From my testing it seems a run can take around 10-15 minutes, which seems acceptable. Assuming you’re doing well you could probably get everything 100% unlocked within an hour or two.

Playtesting time!

2 more days!!

The first half of today was frantically rushing around trying to tie the final disparate pieces of the game together into some sort of functional whole for playtesters. I met with Emmy in the morning to discuss our initial thoughts for balancing the starter deck, card unlocks, & map layout.

After getting a fairly good build together I met up with my dear friends at Biome Collective, who helped out by playtesting the game while streaming their screens. They were very positive about the game too, which was great to hear!

I spent the rest of the day working on fixing their feedback remarks before handing off a second playtest build to Jordan Brown, who has already been helping us out with the sound design on the project :)

Overall we’re feeling really positive about our progress, and we’re really glad to have the whole weekend left for polishing/balancing the core design.

Win conditions?! Scoring, Leaderboard, & Progression

Today I finally got the most basic win condition implemented, a flag marking the start of the mountain trail. When meeples reach here they are considered saved and added to your score.

Also, your score!

I added the score calculations to go along with the working win/lose system we have now, along with a detailed breakdown which you can see below. The score you gain directly affects how much XP you earn, and the number of meeples you save contributes to your PBucks wallet.

I hooked this up to the leaderboard which I had working early on, and it all appears to be working great.

Otherwise I’ve also been tweaking the graboid AI even more, trying to get it to the right balance between chasing down targets but also getting distracted by your.. distraction.. cards. It seems to be working well now, but we haven’t yet tested a full run through with all the cards!

That’s something we’re hoping to start tomorrow, along with getting some outside playtesters to mess with it and see what feedback they have. Exciting :)

Meanwhile Emmy has been finishing up the combat system, & working on specific cards (like the wheelbarrow for clearing debris, or the leap of faith for jumping between rooftops!)

And Caspar is continuing on with their modelling/texture work.

Combat, scanning, & destruction!

I’ve been working on the scanning phase today!

At the start of each of your turns, your seismometers will pulse out and highlight any potential Graboid positions in their quadrant - this gives the player vital info for strategising.

Finally as a little treat I polished up the grid and blueprint placement visuals with some lerping and particles and sounds :)

Emmy has been working on combat! That’s gameplay! Now you can equip your meeples with guns/bombs and have them fight back against the Graboid menace (or just defend themselves if they’re attacked)

They goal is to have a few different weapon types with different stats - basically high damage low ammo guns & low damage high ammo ones.

(you can see my beautiful placeholder art for this below)

Meanwhile Caspar made some more building destruction models, added new card tip icons, & worked on the meeple stat popup UI

Gameplay!

Today we got closer to actually having all the core gameplay implemented;

I was working on the Graboid AI some more - they can now burrow underground to get around faster/without worrying about running into buildings ;)

I also added the snake tongue creatures using Caspar’s lovely model. For now these are much slower than the graboid but are able to immobilise meeples they touch & send out a signal to their graboid parents - dinner is served!

Then I added the occupiable system which allows various entities to support meeples being inside (on top) of them - this will be useful for the buildings, boulders, & vehicles. I’ve already tested the basic truck, its already super fun and endearing watching the meeples drive each other around :)

Emmy’s been working on the grid interactions some more, making the UX better and improving how the clicking input is managed. She also continued on the ruins/boulder objects which are pre-placed in the world and have unique interactions with your meeples.

Caspar was focused more on the UI; the population counter, meeple icons on cards, expanding on object tooltip functionality.

They also continued work on modelling and texturing the 3d assets, and supporting the destruction system

Planning! Music! Ruins! Art!

This morning we all got together to plan our final week of development! Also to iron out the design, since so far we’ve just been working off a vague concept (grid based card gameplay)

A big part of the design meeting was figuring out what meeples do; what actions they can perform, how they can fight back against the graboids, all that good stuff.

We’re feeling a lot more focused and confident with our idea now, and we aim to get a playable prototype done by Friday so we have time for playtesting and feedback before the final submission :)

I sourced some music from my favourite Kevin MACLEOD via his royalty free site today. Inspired by the movie soundtrack I went for a western/country vibe, fairly chill to match the slower paced gameplay. The menu music is diegetic & coming from Chang’s Market, which adds a nice effect when moving around the menu with my camera code from the other day.

Of course I couldn’t leave the menu alone and spent the final part of my day polishing it up some more (I know). I added Valentine & Earl’s truck. which follows you through the menu scene. The different menu ui segments now lerp in and out when you move between states. Very tasty.

Emmy got started on the debris and ruins objects, including meeples being able to search ruins and find temporary midgame cards.

Caspar continued working away on the models + textures, but also mocked up the gameplay UI, some of which you can see below!

Vibrations, Heatmaps, & Graboid AI

Extending the graboid AI/sensors today! Before they were simply moving towards the nearest meeple for testing, but now they track vibrations felt by movement and investigate the closest, strongest vibration for juicy treats.

This is going to help a lot with different types of behaviours, and I’ve already got it working with the prototypical distraction card; the old tractor from the movie. This can be placed on the grid and will automatically move in a straight line making lots of noise and drawing attention.

I also cobbled together this heatmap shader to help visualise the system. I’m not sure how we’ll display this sort of vibration info to the player in the final prototype, but this definitely helps with debugging for now!

Other minor fixes/tweaks/polish to the menus and card system too.

Tomorrow we’ll be meeting early with the full team to flesh out the design some more and plan out the final 7 days of jam time!

Graboid AI, Pathfinding, Decks, & Menus!

Lots of good progress today!

I added the new Graboid agent to the test grid and worked on some A* pathfinding for it to seek out the player’s meeples. If they enter the same cell as a meeple then the meeple explodes in flesh and blood :)

This is all tied in with Emmy’s game state system!

It’s really encouraging feeling the gameplay loop already. It also has a lose condition now - if all your meeples die then it’s game over.

I also polished up the menus some more, adding a scene backdrop for the camera to swoosh around. This gives it a much more dynamic feel, I’m always a fan of these type of menus in games.

Gameplay?!?

Today I finished the basics of the meeple movement; you can now select a meeple and move it 1 grid cell in any cardinal direction (currently not restricted to turns in the game loop but definitely getting there!)

There are also helpful tooltips and visual feedback for invalid choices

Meanwhile Emmy coded the card playing functionality. Currently this means clicking any card allows you to spawn a new meeple on a grid cell of your choice, but its super extendable and will be a great basis for all the different cards we have planned :)