When we decided to start doing monthly recaps we never thought there'd be a month where there would not be anything to recap. June comes close... we only posted once.
The good news is that one post is actually our most popular post yet! With 30 upvotes and a few comments. Thank you all so much. It is really motivating.
The post was about our choice to go with a comic book style visual achieved with a post process effect. We still may tweak it a bit later but everyone seems to like it, so it is probably here to stay.
In our previous recap we talked about our plans for June being mostly environment design. And we did a lot of work on this. We also ran into a lot of troubles with our plans based on the things we were trying in Unreal.
The game plan, overall, is to actually build the levels out as giant monsters called Titans. Think, Shadow of the Colossus, but at a larger scale.
Here is a very rudimentary sketch of the first level's Titan to maybe give an idea of where we are aiming.
This is one of many designs we've went through. Trying to plan this from a technical standpoint has been somewhat challenging. Unlike Shadow of the Colossus, the game is not going to simply be the player trying to stay on the Colossus while it tries to knock you off. We are going to have monster spawns and a beat-em-up style combat system in place. Which has presented a lot of problems. Mostly with Unreal's gravity and nav bounds only working in the Z up direction.
So this is why updates have been sparse this past month. We have tried many things and failed. Mostly.
Our experiments have given us slightly new directions and revealed ideas for game mechanics we hadn't thought of yet. There are always silver linings. 馃槂
We say this every month and it does not always work out but staying optimistic... expect many updates in July! With June's trials seemingly coming to a climax, we are hoping it will all start to come together now. In fact. Expect this guy to be in game and Eddy to be running around on him within the next week! (No pressure 
On July 26th, it will mark our 6th month of being on Hive as well. When we started this we were conducting a bit of a social media experiment. Mostly focusing on decentralized, rewarding social media. There is something specific we plan to try with our next post here on Hive. But either way, also expect us to make a post detailing our experience with all this later this month.
Thanks for reading! Don't forget to upvote and follow us if you like what we are doing. 馃槂
