Hello Everyone and welcome to our end of week Devlog for Dead Heat. And we have one hell of an update this week!

The week got off to a pretty dire start as we suffered an issue with the build that almost lost us all of the previous weeks progress. Something that would have been devastating for us. Especially given our current time table. We were able to recover the work, but it was still a wasted day.

The next day, I brought onto the project some much-needed help. For a long time now, it has just been me working on the project, trying to put together a working vertical slice demo along with gathering funds to hire artists for the project. Our new team members are Jacob Ruttenberg (Huh, didn't know I could link to Twitter like that.); our new Sound Effects Designer, David; our new 3D environment artist who is helping us make the transfer from 2D isometric to 3D fixed perspective, similar to Resident Evil or Fear Effect.
We tested out putting together a 2.5D environment with the Hell's Kitchen model. 

AC fully supports 2.5D games, meaning building the new areas will be a smooth process. How these new areas will be built is very interesting, and offers a dive into how old pre-rendered background games were made. The camera would project the image behind all in scene objects. They would be placed in the scene according to their proper position in the image, so they should match up with the rest of the environment. This is why item pickups and intractable objects look out of place in games like Resident Evil or Silent Hill, the objects are rendered in-scene and are positioned where they can match up with the background picture.
Learning that particular fact made me appreciate those old games in a whole new way.
Currently, we are working hard to create a 3D model for the alleyway and should have it ready within the next week.
In the meantime, Jacob and I began work on some new sound effects for the menus. Our old demo did feature some placeholder sound effects from our composer Edwin Montgomery , but they were few and never intended for the final release. By the time we had them, the decision to move to Unity was set. Our new sound effects will be tested and refined in the coming weeks for the new demo.
Our UI Artist for the old demo, Steve has returned to the project as a 3D Character modeller, one of two we plan to have on the team. The other; a talented artist on twitter by the name of fe, is one who we hope to find funding to hire soon. Steve will be providing the 3D models for the new demo, we will finally see Sonja and Lilith rendered in low poly glory!

Next week will be the culmination of the current demo's mechanics, we now have everything in place to begin rigorous testing of the systems to ensure they all work as close to flawlessly as we can make them. We will also be focusing on the construction of the new 3D assets, making arrangements for EGX and spreading the word on our project.
Thanks for reading this week's Devlog everyone! We hope you will join us again for next Sundays. Things are beginning to ramp up!