Characters, Backgrounds and Traits, oh my!

Welcome back y'all, got a shorter one for you this week. We've been doing research on other similar games for inspiration, working on a new trait system for characters, and making art for various aspects of the game. We're nearing the end of the quarter at UCSC, so finals are coming up which has us at a bit of a crunch. 

Health Update

As discussed in our last devlog, I swore that I would include any and all "news about our team that is worth mentioning such as death, rebirth, ascension or any other major transitory processes that occur willingly or unwillingly to our devs". I wrote that rather jokingly, but as of a few days ago Joey has contracted a tragic illness that has severely hampered his ability to code for the game. He should be back and running at full speed in a few weeks but in the meantime is limited to shorter coding sessions.

Traits

In Whalefall, we plan to have many characters available for your crew, similar to what you might see in games like FTL. We initially planned for a roster of curated characters that would all have unique aspects and traits to them that made them feel deeply rooted in our world. To this extent, Micah has been designing character concepts (1 of which we have to share later on in this devlog :0) for the available crewmembers you can recruit. 

We then came to the idea of randomized traits, which we considered adding as an 'ascension' or newgame+ feature. A list of positive and negative traits that can be randomly applied to any recruited member, similar to how Balatro handles the black stake or gold stake difficulties. We have some fun coming up with these traits, with ideas like Skedaddle and Zoomer, traits that revolve around movement in the ship, or more beneficial ones like Shield Buddy, Blissfully Unaware and Bullseye, which increase defense, ignore debuffs and improve accuracy respectively. We'll continue to make this list more extensive as time goes on, adding more traits or improving old ones to balance out with the new. Its a pretty exciting system that should make crew member management much more engaging

Character Art

Micah has been designing ideas for characters so far such as the captain, various crew members, and the endgame character that you search for in the story. 

This is one of the character sprites he designed for one of the characters in the story and I am LOVING the style so far

Background Art

Tess has been making some background art for various battle locations, working from the top down. She has the Epipelagic zone started, and its looking very clean. We aim to have small variations to each battle background to keep it fresh each time you fight a monster.

Coming soon to whalefalls near you

This next week we plan to just keep workin away at various designs. As we come closer to the end of the quarter you'll be seeing less work as we need to devote more time to finals and finishing up projects for our classes.

Thanks all for coming to my TED Talk, and we'll see you next week!

-Conrad