Since my last post the team have been tested in some ways and have hit what I personally feel is our lowest standard of work to be done for a deadline. When it came to the Vertical Slice, everything seemed to be on track. However, we made some mistakes and certain circumstances prevented us from reaching the high standards we always strive for.
First of all, we were without one of our programmers for a large amount of time in the last couple of weeks which left Simon with a lot of coding to do on his own. This was a huge factor, but could not be helped and it did set us back a bit. I feel partly responsible however because I had only given the team a paper design for my level when I should have given them a version that was on a grid and completely to scale etc. We had other issues such as the animations not being done properly in one project and they became mismatched when put into the game. Also, some of the art assets weren't the right size so Simon had to spend time editing them.
Overall, it was a collection of errors across the team that ultimately meant that we didn't have much of a level to show. I was disappointed because we have yet to show of any actual gameplay in terms of a full level with game challenges and obstacles. Our previous demo had shown off how to play and how to use the mechanics but there still isn't any challenge there. We showed them what we had and we threw together a quick presentation to show them that we have actually improved on a lot of aspects of the game but we just haven't had time to get them into a build of the game just yet. However, we are currently working hard with the time we have left to get our levels finished to a high standard. Unfortunately, this means we have had to cut a lot of the game out. We originally wanted the game to have 10 levels including 5 chapters of narrative telling Hop's story to the player. We have had to cut it to 5 levels plus a tutorial so that we can get it all finished. This means that we can only fit one of our storyboard/cutscenes into the game and there won't be any time to tell the whole story. Any narrative other than the opening storyboard is going to be transmitted to the player via in-game dialogue. This was a huge blow for me after writing the story but I know it's very necessary and to finish all of the work we had planned just isn't feasible anymore.
This feels like a very negative post but we knew that this wasn't going to be easy and we knew things would change the further we got into this project. We're all still learning and we have made some mistakes but we have learned a hell of a lot from the past few weeks. We have already moved past this and are fully focused on making Dimension Hop the best we can for that final deadline. We know we have something special with this game and now we're gonna make sure we do it justice.
