Hello and welcome back to the 7th Devlog of  "The Backrooms"!

After a short break, we continued our work in Production Sprint 2! 
 As always, there will be a new build available to download on Tuesday, so feel free to try it out yourself! :)

What is new?

RFX

One of our focus points during this week was, to start adding more visual feedback for the player. That includes not only the interface, but also first RFX.

To make the creation of RFX easier and faster, we started by creating breakdowns for each of them, in which we describe / draw how the RFX is going to look like and what it consists of. In the following you can see several of those RFX breakdowns for different effects:

Interface

As mentioned above, another part we worked on in this week, is the interface. We already had placeholders, which you might have seen, if you played one of the previous versions, but now they were replaced by the actual UI graphics. They are not yet completely finished and the colors will need some adjusting, to perfectly fit into the game, but in general it is really close to what we have in mind and previously stated in the Art Bible.

The Interface can be divided into two parts: 

Level Design

Our Level will be randomly generated with 16 different rooms. While each rooms stays always the same, the way they are connected and where they are located will change throughout the game, so the it is played in an ever changing environment.

Since we already have a lot of assets, which will help us to build the rooms, this week we worked on the room-layout. This layout determines the size of each room and how many doors (possible connections to other rooms) they have.

Decals

Apart from the assets and textures for wall/floor, Decals are a great way to decorate the rooms and create an atmosphere. After we drew some sketches and collected references, we turned these concepts and ideas into textures, which we can use as decals in Unreal Engine.

The Priest

At last, we also continued working and finished most of the Animations for the Priest character, which provided us with some troubles in the previous weeks, because of its long robe and non-existent legs.

The Priest Animations are not yet implemented in game, but will be during the next week.

Programming

Since we are already talking about the Priest-Animations, we can talk about the implementation of the Priest-Mechanics as well! We implemented the Praying-Mechanic (Priest-Attack), so that it stops moving and starts casting. It also has a cooldown, so it won't be constantly attacking the Player.

In addition to that, we worked on spawning the NPCs. Previously there were only a few ones and as soon as they were killed, there was no way to continue the game, since no new ones would be spawning and you would inevitably die.
But now that the NPCs are actually spawning there is a theoretically infinite number of possible victims to consume for the Backrooms-Monster! :D

We would love to show you a gif of how this looks ingame, but we intentionally only let them spawn outside the player's field of view, so you can't actually see it happening.

Where do we go from here?

The next week will be the last week of our Production Sprints. Afterwards, there is only the Polish Sprint left, in which we will refine all the previously implemented mechanics / assets / graphics etc, but no new features will be added anymore.

So in the next week, we will definitely implement the Priest with all off its mechanics and animations in game. We will also keep working on the interface and create the missing graphics for the Main-Menu, as well as Pause-Menu and Leaderboard. 

There are also still a bunch of RFX left to be created and implemented and we definitely need to start creating the Rooms with all the assets we have been working on so far.

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

See you next week!