Hello all! Welcome back to another week working on Chimera! Unfortunately due to some personal circumstances we weren't able to be as productive as normal, but this is something we have prepared for, so we are still on schedule! We have a few things to show you this week, but more importantly we want to let you all know about our BETA release!!! In our course, our beta is due in just under a week on the 20th of March. We should be able to hit that deadline but we might take a few extra days to prepare and polish before releasing it on our itch page, but we should have the beta version up by the end of the week. 

Enough about deadlines, lets get into the details of the changes we made this week. 

Design and development

First things first, we have now implemented new combat UI into the game! While its not as perfect and pristine as we want it to be, and still needs a ton of polishing before its fully finished, the UI itself is fully functional (apart from a few bugs).

Next up, we finished the white box and plans for an expansion to the games content! We don't want to over scope but we received a lot of feedback about the games current length. While it is missing a ton of dialogue and small bits that will change the gameflow from a simple battle simulator, we also understood that the game needed a little bit more kick to it. We don't want to reveal too much here so you can explore and find the new stuff in the beta, but expect a bit more content in the full release!

We also finished implementing the new way we are planning to use cameras. The team decided that we loved the resident evil style cameras. They need a lot of tweaking and changing but for now, we are happy with the direction the cameras have taken the games atmosphere and vision. 

Assets

There was a lot more work on the art side of development this week. The team finished off the combat UI, and brainstormed a new idea for how we want our menus to be displayed! We had some really creative ideas and some concept images to show you all!

A bunch more work is being done in the background but we have even more to talk about on the art side!

We have a small teaser for some of the new models and decorations that you can find around the house, as well as a sneak peak at a new NPC we are adding to the game!

All of the visuals for our game are still a big work in progress right now! With the beta just around the corner the team is focused on getting as much of the content into the game as possible. Right now, we have all of the necessary elements prepared and ready, but the team has a lot of polishing for the game feel and visuals left to do, which is going to be our primary focus going forward this week!

It might not seem like a whole lot, but that's all we can share for this week! Again, there is a ton of stuff we can't talk about, and a few situations outside of our control this week have hurt development time, but everyone in the team is doing well and fired up to finish our beta!