Disclaimer - These devlogs are one part of a University assignment that Styx is being developed for, so any stilted wording or weird inclusions can be traced back to that fact.

STYX Devlog #2

For a quick recap of what the game is about, see Devlog #1 here.

What's new for STYX?

I've been continuing to work hard as the team's game designer, level designer, and producer - the artists have been hard at work sketching all manner of concept art for our main character (Charon) and a notable bar-tending NPC (Dionysus), while our programmer has been working on four-directional movement that doesn't just work, but feels good to control. Great stuff!

We've also made several mood boards, like the one above, to help nail down what we want the "feel" of the game to be. It may not seem important, but while we're still deciding on how the pixel art should look, it helps create a visual 'style' and consistency. 

Knowing which mythological figures are present in the game has seen our story begin to form with relatively low stakes but plenty of room for the classic "messed up Mythology gods' family drama" that everyone loves - sharing a mother with our boat-loving protagonist, The Keres (AKA 'spirits of violent death') will be our main villains, and should make for an interesting boss fight (or three!)

At the time of writing, we're at the start of our second 'sprint'; there's lots to be done, but with the 'boilerplate' tasks completed, I believe we'll have some exciting things to show before too long.

Progress

• Wrote design document sections for unique selling points and other high concept statements
• Wrote design document sections for unique enemies and ship abilities
  
• Found Game Endeavor's fantastic dev log series that we'll likely use as melee combat inspiration
• Created a list of extremely cool mythology - I'll link to some of it in the comments!
• Added a tilemap with working collisions to our Unity project
• Assigned everyone's tasks for the sprint ahead
  
• Determined our 'minimum viable product' (MVP) for this pre-production assignment:
• 2 enemies (with final designs planned if not outright complete)
• 2 distinct, completable levels
• 2 ship combat mechanics
• 1 melee combat mechanic.
• 3 functional, unlockable 'upgrades' of any kind

Thoughts

With the creation of a Discord group chat, and finding a few Trello tricks that make it much easier to see who needs to do what - I'm happy to report that our communication has improved greatly! The design document is now in a great state, too, and the prototypes are now focused on executing the ideas within.

I'd still like to contribute to the project more meaningfully, and think that's the biggest area for improvement this week - while the artists work hard on fleshing out their ideas and programmer works on movement and combat, I should be seeing how feasible my ideas for the ship are with rough prototypes in Unity.

While we're still in early stages, consistency is important; everyone's voices are valuable and ideas are in flux, but conversations about 'how cool x mechanic might be' can quickly get out of hand, meaning I should be careful to keep us focused on the minimum viable product for now.

Going Forward

My main focus for now is to keep us consistent; knowing the scope of the MVP means we can work towards completing each aspect of it in stages, with any remaining time usable for polish and implementing whatever remains in the design document.

Before creating the level designs I mentioned last week, I'd like to create some prototypes specifically for the ship combat ideas I've been coming up with - this will be a great way to contribute meaningfully to the project, and lighten our programmer's workload. 

That's a wrap on devlog #2 - thank you for reading!