Devlog #5

Hi all! The Fellas are back again with another devlog! We are in the midst of further refining The Hawkshaw Files!  For this week, we would love to share the progress of our game's development last week!

Art

Character Art

We are ready to show new concepts of our protagonist, Emil Hawkshaw, and the design we have planned for his clothing and aesthetic. We wanted to update the detective's old design so that it is more in line with our current art style.  We plan to have a couple of emotion-sprites for our protagonist such as  Neutral, Sad, Angry, Pondering, Happy, etc.  We had 2 designs in mind for the protagonist:one much older and another slightly younger. The older one had a much more defined beard, whereas the younger design lacked one but had a sharply defined face. After much deliberation with the team, we decided that the older design was more aligned with our vision for the character!  We later refined the design to include elements we liked from the younger design, such as the rectangular glasses.  To finish off the character work for last week, we worked on a colour test for the character with much success.

The Original Emil Hawkshaw You All Know!

Emil Hawkshaw Redesign (Left: Younger, Square Glasses, Earrings) (Right: Older, Round Glasses, Beard)

Emil Hawkshaw Redesign with clothing concepts (including shoes, shirts, ties and detective coat), as well as a colour test

Programming

We have re-added the profile tab in the journal for players. This was supposed to be in the first version of the beta, but was scrapped due to time. This will show you information about the people related to each case. For example, here are the ones in the tutorial for Katya, Nicolai, and The Secretary! 

Nicolai, Katya and The Secretary's profiles

We have also reworked the brief section for the tutorial case to be shorter and more to the point. We did this because we recieved feedback about how it went on for too long, and got a little boring. We want to make sure players are hooked on the story from the get-go, so an interesting tutorial is pivotal for that!

Audio

We have worked on a little snippet of music for our social media posts and we have plans to use them for our game trailer! You can find it on our official tiktok and instagram pages!

Current Work

Our main plan is to continue working on some bug fixes and general polish, as well as to work on our trailer for this week. We also plan to finish the character art for Hawshaw and implement the characters into scenes so that they blend in with the world and lighting better!