Hey all, It's the end of the second week and so far, everything has progressing smoothly at Team Hi-lite.
The second and third weeks are always the most stressful, we've started work on mostly everything but nothing is done yet, so it can get a bit overwhelming thinking about how much is left and seeing the list of tasks grow bigger and bigger.
2D art is probably the furthest along, all the characters have concept art, logos and rough vehicle art, we've figured out how we want things to play out story wise for each racer, a lot of UI work has also been completed and is undergoing implementation at the moment, Character select screen is already in game.
We also have animated 2D sequences like the Team Hi-lite logo last week, there's gonna be a few more in the game as well.
We're gonna have ending illustrations for each character and have planned out how they are gonna look but haven't finished any of them yet, we probably won't show them off in the devlogs, gotta keep some things secret until the game is out.
Story will be handled in a pretty different way than we've done before, instead of a linear narrative we're doing arcade mode grand prix where players can play as different characters, and when you beat the campaign you get an ending illustration showing what happens if that character wins, it means that seeing everything the game has to offer will take longer than 30 min but each "run" is far shorter than that.
We originally planned to have a fixed narrative with a specific playable character and more story content but letting players choose who to play ended up being a better fit for this type of game.
I'm still working on how long I want the campaign for each character to be, we currently have 7 playable characters, with 2 unlockable ones, we have 3 tracks with 1 "final" track planned as well, we might have each campaign go through all 4 tracks or just 2 tracks each character so that they feel less repetitive to play through.
We're also thinking about having single race and time trials available for fun, the mechanics are there so it's not a ton of extra work to implement.
We've also started working on 3D art a bit, we have some landscape and foliage assets in game and a few other high priority assets like the modular track mesh and textures.
We have 3 different tracks in the at the moment, there's a 4th final track planned but we haven't started working on it yet.
We still need a bunch of env. art for each map but the main thing missing art wise are the different vehicles, we have some good ideas how they're gonna look but will flesh out the concepts a bit before we start working on the final assets.
We're going for a fairly stylized art style, not quite as cartoony as Death Whisper Diaries but we want the 3D to feel in sync with the 2D art we've been getting.
the CRT and vertex wobble filters have also been implemented, giving the game the old school PSX look we always go for.
Audio is generally handled fairly late in development, we've started collecting some assets and are even doing some voice acting for the announcer and characters, we're still working on the script a bit but have found people willing to contribute their voices.
Mechanics wise there's been a lot of progress, main menu, character select and all vehicle mechanics are in but will all get a bit of iteration later on as polish.
Main missing thing is the AI, our programmer Max has been working on it but we haven't merged it into the main branch yet, there's a few mechanics dependent on the AI so its the next big thing we need to focus on getting in, so we can work on race position tracking, scoring and the grand prix win/lose states.
Overall I feel pretty good about our progress so far, the plan was to have a playable build in the first week and by week 3 I want the game in an "alpha" state, as in all main mechanics are in and you can get from start to finish in some capacity, whether or not we manage to get there depends on how AI implementation goes.
That's it for this week, next week I hope to have some in game footage in video format with the correct HUD and a proper vehicle asset and some AI racers.