(Posted originally on our blog)

Hi guys!

Last week was a big one, we finally ended a bunch of major components of the game that we've been working for weeks now.

Starting off with one of the biggest worries about the Oirbo engine since the beginning, the area loading. Since the start of the project, we wanted to have a world without any special rooms or sections that required loading, basically copying the Ori model of loading the world as we needed it. Although Ori is also a Unity game, initially there were a lot of concerns if we would be able to match their system, especially since we don't have the years nor the track record of Ori team to do something like this. Online documentation also didn't help, with a lot of people saying that it was something hard to do and little to no official documentation on loading 2D worlds. With all things considered it wasn't that hard. We just needed some organization and two managers to control everything. We organized the areas in two levels:

• A scene per area
• Multiple sections on each area

In the image above we have the Oirbo world right now, 2 areas each on its own Unity Scene. And on each of them a multitude of rooms (the random colored squares).

When the game loads an area, it's empty and as the player walks around we start loading each section individually, this approach resulted in no lag loading either the scenes or the sections, even the larger ones. We will discuss the implementation in-depth on a future Insider View post (this Thursday)

We made the loading system so versatile that implementing a fast travel system literally took us 30 minutes, and a few hours to test and double-check everything. A loading screen here is pretty much unavoidable, but it usually loads everything in a few seconds so we are confident that it won't damage the gameplay that much. Still, you can always walk from one side to another without any loading screens XDD.

Finally, our new animations are finally in place, we still have a bunch to integrate but we pretty much control the 2D skeleton animation system at will right now, although the animator state machine is starting to look chaotic, its so worth it with the smooth animations and transitions. As an example, the Oirbo jump has 6 different animation states, finally getting rid of the cringe that we felt when we jumped up and pressed a direction button.

This week we will continue the Oirbo animation process, the minor but also important stuff, like the hit animation, spawn, etc, and we are finally starting adding VFX to the character and world!! This means that we are almost finished with the game systems, and hopefully, in a few weeks, we can go back on adding content!

As usual, don't forget to Wishlist the game on Steam and follow the development daily news on our Twitter or Facebook!