(Posted originally on our blog)

Hi guys!

Last week, we skipped the devlog since we spent almost all of our time working on the final details of the Anesthesiologist  Robo and the Health button. This week though we have a lot to share :D

To start let's talk a little about the Astral Pod:

A few weeks ago, we implemented the medical area main mechanic, Astral Oirbo, but only this past week we finally put in the art and final effects for it. In the gif above you can see all the effects at work. 

The most important are the little arrows that work as a little timer to ease the transition between regular controls and astral controls (Astral Oirbo only allows left/right controls), with it we expect to smooth the transition and let the player know when it will regain control over Oirbo. The other is the Astral Door, that helps transmit to the player that it's the same place to hit unlike pretty much everything else when in Astral form. This is further emphasized with the tiles we designed of the astral sections, where the dark palette contrasts neatly with the light blue used throughout the game to signal safe places:

Continuing with the design changes you probably already noticed, but we finally added the base tiles for the section, we decided to go with green for the medical area because it's a very common color used on hospital scrubs.

On the nature area, we tried to transition from the warehouse area in a seamless way, so its palette contains a few similar colors, but on the medical area we went completely haywire and did something totally different

(above the medical area entrance from the warehouse area)

Since it was harder to design some specific visual feature that would distinguish the medical area from the warehouse area (e.g the grass on the nature area) we decided that the only rule of the medical area regarding color would be low to no greys, and the result is in the screenshot above, visually the player knows that it's entering a new area.

The only new mechanic we added this week was the trap platforms, basically, they allow the player to touch them for a very short amount of time before disappearing, once again we designed them to be multi-purpose, like the give above demonstrates. Besides being a regular platform, it also can serve as a temporary wall for the player making it super versatile for future platforming challenges.

Finally, we also added the spikes for the medical area, which are actual lasers xDD but mechanically it works in the same way as the warehouse electric wires and the nature spikes.

With all this work done, we only have 2 mechanics to implement before having the complete set for the medical area, until then enjoy the little animation that we continue to update as we work more on the medical area:

What are your thoughts on the current progress? Don't forget to join us on  Discord, Twitter and wishlist the game on  Steam.