Week 2: Proof of Concept

This week, we started working on the core features of our game. At this stage, we had a discussion on how to approach block effects and paint. We settled on differentiating walking vs manual painting. The user can choose to walk on an uncoloured block and consume a unit or click on it, and paint it, but also apply the paint’s unique effect to it. For example, painting a block red would raise it by one unit. 

We decided on a simplistic UI design, which we created some simple assets for. Although our undo is technically on the UI, we haven’t gotten it working yet. As for blocks, we managed to implement 4 basic block effects this week:

• Yellow: Block that will Rise 
• Red: Block will drop
• Cyan: Can be pushed 
• Green: Will extend the painted block in all 4 directions 

We went through some thought on how best to create connections between each colour and their effect, although green and cyan were pretty intuitive to connect to ice and growth, red and yellow were far less straightforward. We settled on bricks and clouds, which were easy to understand. 

We also added two interactables, a little creature that could be painted and would lower a wall and a creature that would charge through obstructions and break them. At first, the player colliding with the creature would result in painting the creature if they had enough paint, but we ended up changing this to having the player manually paint the creature since this better matched with the existing painting behaviour. 

And with these, we had combined all these features into our very first level!