Welcome to week 5 of our devlog for SKalley!

This week we finally got started into production. That means we can get working for real! We would love to share with you our progress on some of these developments.

Art:
Character Design:

Made by our lovely and hard-working artist Bram we have our first official character for SKalley ready to cause mischief in the alleyways. Enter, Zoëy!

We are excited and cannot wait to share you our future upcoming companions to roam the streets!

Starting zone
With many playtests we noticed it was a bit annoying that the game immediately starts when you play it, we thought about this and came with a fun narrative and practical use a waiting lobby.
Narrative-wise we went ahead with a police blockade surrounding the players and trapping them in an alley. When the game starts the players will have to move away from them in order not to get caught. See here a preview, but highly work-in-progress starting zone.


Lighting
With the narrative established, we also want to give the players the sense of being chased, in order to capture that feeling we have added police lights on the far end of the screen looming ever-closer to the players who don't manage to keep up with the pace.

Programming
With the production being fully greenlit we started reorganizing the scripts to be more readable and cleaner coded. Right now we think we are very well on track. But that does not mean we haven't added anything new!

Revamped procedural generation
As part of the production process we wanted to improve our procedural generation to be more smoother. Aside from that we also changed the way the camera sees the world, we now play the game sideways because we feel like that this improves the view of what's to come within the procedural generation.

New powerup - Baseball bat
A new dangerous powerup has arrived in the alley, players can pick it up and use it to whack their opponents down for quite some time, in a fixed AoE. But to balance it a bit, we gave it 1 second of a wind-uptime and a visual feedback to display its radius. But it still is a force to be reckoned with!


Startingzone
We mentioned that we have a startingzone, but it also serves as a waiting room for players to join in and get a feel with the game's controls before it officially starts, we hope this reduces the stress and annoyance before where it immediately started playing.

All players present in the game will have to go to a designated zone to start the game.


Sound
Our sound artist has started working on implementing a sound handler in our game, progress is looking a lot better then expected, and we hope to share the vibes and atmosphere straight from the Alley!

And with that we finished the 1st week of production! See you next week!