Devlog 1: May 15 - May 22

Moving forward from the game jam, our team feels confident that our mechanic base (limb-tossing to solve puzzles) will provide us with robust design opportunities and allow us to make Ditch the Dollhouse an engaging experience for the remaining weeks.

Our production team is investing in documentation to smooth out our process, a team charter to establish ground rules and overall goals for the project, investing time into Trello as an organizational tool to make sure members of the team know what they're doing, and managing deliverables like this devlog.

Our design team is still in the early phases of design, figuring out how to make the limb throwing feel better and brainstorming on the puzzle and platforming ideas to solidify our core mechanical processes. However, we're routinely checking in with the rest of the team to ensure that none of our ideas are jumping out of the scope we've established for ourselves.

The programming team put in a lot of good work during the game jam and set us up with something that we can start to iterate on quickly and creatively, and are contributing to the design decisions to keep us on track in terms of what is doable in the amount of time we have to set us up for initial playtests.

Overall, the future of Ditch the Dollhouse looks bright and after the first week, the team is excited to work on the project and push ourselves to make the best puzzle-platformer we can.

During the Game Jam, our team was able to create a prototype showcasing some of the core mechanics of the game.

What we've achieved so far:

Basic Movement System and Third-Person Camera:

• The player can move along 2 axes and jump
• The input system only allows for hard-coded keys
• The camera follows the player and can rotate around it

Limb Mechanics:

• The player can throw each arm in a straight line
• The player can move near a thrown arm to pick it back up

Level Design:

• Created a demo scene to test interactions between limb-throwing mechanics and puzzle objects (a pressure plate)
• Experimented with visual assets/textures that fit the aesthetic the team is looking for

Our next milestones:

Upgrade the movement system:

• We would like to use Unity's Input System to support controllers

Assets:

• We are currently working on a design for the main character
• We need to determine a consistent art style for the assets of our game
• We need to agree on an atmosphere for the background music

Limb Mechanic Improvements:

• We are brainstorming limb variations, the abilities they provide the player, and how they interact with environment objects

Screenshots: