Hello and welcome back to the 6th Devlog of "The Backrooms"!

Last week concluded the first Production Sprint, so in this week, we started Production Sprint 2!
We were able to finish a lot of new assets, animations and features, which we will present to you in this Devlog!

Feel free to download the newest build (will be updated on Tuesday) and try it yourself!

Game Assets

Since we were able to wrap up a lot regarding the characters and their animations in the last week, in this week, we didn't need to only focus on the characters, but could also create more assets, which will decorate the Backrooms.

Protagonist

As you might have noticed, in the last version of the game, the protagonist wouldn't stop walking - that was because the only animation we had so far, was the walk cycle. This definitely had to change this week, so we worked on creating an idle animation for the protagonist.
Now he doesn't have to walk all the time, anymore:

  

Of course, the protagonist cannot only walk around or stand still, but he can (and has to) attack and kill the humans. So far, there was no real visual indication for when the player is attacking, but with an attack-animation, the player will actually get feedback whether the character is attacking or not, which will definitely improve the gaming experience. 

But wait... there's more!
It is very likely, that no matter how good you are, at one point you will die. It wouldn't be really logical and maybe even confusing, if suddenly, the character just respawns, while still walking, so we also created a death-animation for the protagonist:

Sounds

Next to all the visual aspects, especially in a game with an eerie atmosphere, the sound is of huge importance. Not only will it help creating and defining the atmosphere, but it will also be really important regarding the player feedback - a kill with splashy noises *sounds* way more fun than a kill with no sound at all.

We already started working on sound effects in the last week - mostly for death and kill sound-effects for both the NPCs and Protagonist. This week we also worked on background sounds. They are not yet implemented in the current game version, since they are still WIP and it is hard to "show" them here in the devlog, so stay tuned for future updates, in which at one point the sounds will be included!

Environment Assets

Even though we already created a few assets for the normally empty Backrooms, the Backrooms in our game should be filled with more props. We wanted to create more assets of different sizes and still needed to create some assets, related to mechanics (like the doors and destroyed generators).

In the following, you can see the assets, we created this week:

Programming

This week's programming, was mostly focused on the AI and base mechanics. The basic AI behavior still caused some problems, which we were able to fix. In addition to that, we started adding the Priest NPC with it's basic behaviors (e.g. prayer-attack to damage the protagonist and following the player). It is not yet finished, so that is definitely something, we will continue working on in the next weeks. 

Since there now is an attack animation for the player character, we could also improve the hit registration for the player's attack. Previously, it was only a box-area around the player-character, but now it follows the protagonist's claw :
(In this gif you can see the generator-destruction-mechanic as well!)

We also had some issues with the camera zooming in veeeeerry close, which we were able to fix as well. Though this led to a "new" problem (it already occurred during the prototyping phase), which is, that the player character now cannot be seen anymore, when he is behind a wall and hidden from the camera, but we were able to find a solution for that, which you can see in the following gif:

Where do we go from here?

First and foremost we have to let you know, that we will take a short break during the Easter Holidays. That means, even though we will continue working, there won't be a new Devlog until the 19th of April.

One of the things will continue working on are definitely the environment - that means, finishing some assets, creating more background sounds, finishing decals and creating the room layout and the rooms. We will also start working on the art for the main menu and interface.

On the programming side, we will continue focusing on the AI and start with the map generation, to come closer to our goal of having an ever changing level layout. We will also start working on a "fog of war" so that the player won't be able to see all the surrounding rooms anymore.

If you should have any feedback or questions, feel free to leave a comment! 

See you again in April!