It's the third week of developing and we're... done? It's hard to believe how much we've already achieved in just 3 weeks of prototyping and trying things out!

Camera

Just last week we figured out the position of one camera... and now we have 4! Just kidding, sort of.

Our team was advised to try out a four-way split screen to see how playing the game would feel then, what are your opinions? Share your thoughts on the split screen prototype down bellow and let us know if you prefer it over the regular view from the first prototype of this week.

Map

The attentive readers may have already noticed that we have some very, very, very early prototype versions of our map as well! We're still experimenting with different map layouts and designs, but it's nice to already kind of see it coming together! One main thing we are trying to include in the different map designs is verticality. This is very important to us because we feel that it's going to make the game a whole lot more interesting and fun if you can push your enemies of a cliff for example. Oh right, we haven't told you about that yet.

You can push enemies now!

Mechanics

From now on if you press the Right Shoulder Button (RB) of your controller you will perform a powerful push attack. This gives you the ability to shove enemies away from you. However there is also another functionality to it. The push feature will also allow you to "push" teammates, but vertically. Doing this gives them a boost and could help them reach higher ground which could potentially lead to a shorter route to the enemies' cave, so teamwork and communication is key!

As for the other mechanics we have tried out different things ranging from interactable tar pits to working campfires, but let's start with the main goal of the game.

Making the working campfire was very essential to testing how the game will actually play since it's the main win condition. We currently made it so the campfire has a score attached to it (which for now floats above the campfire but later will be included in the UI). The campfire score constantly decreases as time progresses and we included a couple of different ways to bring the score back up and avoid freezing to death!

There's 3 ways to increase the size of your fire: wooden sticks, tar pits and most importantly, stealing from the enemy fire! The wooden sticks are the easiest to obtain and thus provide the least "points" towards your fire. You can obtain them by hitting a tree with your wooden club, which will make some sticks drop from the tree. You can then pick these up and bring them to the area around your campfire or simply throw them inside by pressing the interact button again.

Next up are tar pits which are slightly more scarce, around 4 tar pits appear on the map so you will have act fast to get to them first. You can pick up tar with your club and use it to set up a trap which will slow enemy players down, or feed it into your fire.

The last and most rewarding option will be to enter the lion's den, AKA the enemy player's cave and steal flames from their campfire. When successfully  bringing the flames to your campfire and avoiding the enemies the size of your fire will increase dramatically! On top of this the enemy team will lose some of their points since you stole it from them!

Prototypes

This being said however, we didn't want to put all of our eggs in one basket. We also continued to develop our original idea to see how a more finalized product would look like. The 2 prototypes share a lot of core features (the combat remains the same in both games for example), but the new camera angle would require us to design and build upon the game in a different way. So to see which we preferred, we worked on both!

We also have our first player-made obstacle in the game, it doesn't really have a shape yet but it does the job. The point of this obstacle is to obstruct a path based on the way it is pushed, this changes the way players have to navigate the map and should result in more interesting gameplay. 

This couldn't be possible without a map and that is why our wonderful artists produced some nice block out maps for us to import and play on. Although they look nice, their main purpose is purely to test the level layout and the new aspect to the game. To wrap this beautiful package up, the prototype also has most of the game's winning conditions and gameplay implemented as well as the foundation for the game (depending on what version we choose).

User Interface

Every successful indie game needs a fun UI to match the vibes, so we made one! Cem has designed a mock-up for the HUD and UI incorporating fun design elements like the fire and the characters as stylized drawings.

This is sort of what you can expect in the near future!

The passage of the seasons will be displayed along with a timer at the top of the HUD, letting you know how much time you have left until the end of the game. Players can see their icons and score at the bottom of the screen in the respective corner of their team's side.

Characters

How could we almost forget about our beloved Grot? Worry not! He is currently fighting our programming battles in the form of a blockout.

Meet Grot, or should we say... Protogrot?

Worry not dear readers as this is just a prototype made with the purpose of testing out some shaders, your favorite caveman will get a well-deserved make-over in about 3 weeks from now and come back stronger than ever! (and with animations!)

This just about wraps it up for the past week of development, we are eager to hear from you! What do you think we should add? What are you looking most forward to? Is your favorite caveman going to survive upcoming winter? You'll have to stick around to find that out!

With love and fire, the Dev-men.