Hello, dear readers! It’s time for another updates,
yes; it’s been two weeks since the last one. I hope that you’ve had a good
time.
Things draw to a close, now, with a lot of deadlines in
the near future. We have to have all the code finished by Monday, as well as
the promotional material. The trailer that we will be making will also be
posted on this blog, so keep your eyes out for that.
Further along in the week, we’ve got the presentations
on Wednesday, followed by the symposium on Friday. Don’t forget to visit us if
you’re there!
After that, it’ll be over. You won’t be hearing from me
on this blog anymore. I suppose it’s sad, isn’t it? Alas, all things must end,
sooner or later, and so must this. However, not before we deliver a finished
product! Which is what I’ll talk to you about, now.
I mentioned last time that we had new sprites, and
those have been implemented now! Although the game is not completely finished
yet, I can share some exciting screenshots with you!
(Bear in mind, though, that the FoV for the player has
not been completed yet, so what you’re going to see now won’t show that off.)
In this first picture, you can see two of our enemies:
a beetle, and a green spider. Now, the green spider is new; it works almost
completely like the original spider, except it fires off three shots of venom
and those shots do not slow you or damage you over time, but instead they just
damage you.
Here, you can see the green spider in action; you have
to be really careful when dodging those shots. Good luck with that!
Pictured above is the player using the stun ability! Of
course, normally, there would be an enemy in front of you, but getting the
timing of the screenshot right was a bit tricky. Perhaps you’ll see that in the
trailer! When you use this ability successfully, you stun the enemy for a
little bit.
I hope you can agree with me that the graphics look
really good, and I’d once again like to thank our artist, Ivan, for doing such
a wonderful job. Without him, things would probably be looking a lot worse.
Now, let’s move on: we are currently in the progress of
making the finishing touches. Dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, you know
how it is. I, myself, am in the progress of creating the sound effects and the
music. Most of the sound effects have already been added, and the music is
already largely composed, but I still have some work left to do.
I’m not a composer by any stretch of the imagination,
but I believe I have done a pretty good job so far on the music. However, I won’t
be letting you hear my work just yet; you’ll have to play the game to hear it.
(Perhaps I’ll use it in the trailer, though, so you can hear it then; you’ll
see when that time comes.)
Earlier on, I mentioned something about the FoV. This
is something that Paul is working on; we’ll make it so that you can’t see
everything on the screen, but only the things that the ant would,
realistically, be able to see. Of course, this FoV won’t be the most advanced
system, since we have a very limited timespan for this particular element.
However, a very basic version has already been made, and I’m sure it will turn
out great.
Another thing we’re working on is the menus. Up until
now, we’ve only concentrated on the actual playing of the game, and not of the
title screen and settings and related stuff. So, that’s a thing we’re adding.
Something that might be interesting to note is that you
will be able to choose between two control schemes: moving with pathfinding
(right-click) or moving with the WASD keys. This has been added after a lot of
consideration and discussion; in the beginning, we had planned to only use
pathfinding, but we’d added the WASD controls before the pathfinding was
finished, and some of us preferred playing with that. So, in the end, we
decided to give the player the option to choose between the two! This way, we
can’t go wrong.
All in all, we’re almost done, sweet readers, which is
a very good thing, since that’s how far we’re supposed to be! Let’s see how
this all turns out, right?
Of course, I still have to tell you a fun piece of ant
trivia! I’m really glad this is coming to an end, because I’m running out of
those. However, I still have this for you: you can find ants on almost every
continent; in fact, the only continent where they don’t live is Antarctica!
(Yes, even though the name even begins with “ant”.)