At the controls


Hello everyone and welcome to our end of week devlog for Dead Heat

This week we have been working on more technical elements with the game. Fixing up control and settings options for the player and working on different ways to tackle scene sprites.
For those unfamiliar, scene sprites are separate images placed in the scene and over the pre-rendered background to simulate depth. These sprites are cut from the same background and lined up perfectly so you should not even know they are there. They should appear when needed to simulate turning a corner or passing under a foreground element within the shot.
However, with Dead Heat we faced a problem. The backgrounds are animated. This means that we would need to animate the backgrounds and line them up perfectly with the scene. This would be a much more time-consuming affair and would mean we would need to take this into consideration when designing later scenes. We want to use dynamic lighting where possible as this is Noir, but how many foreground elements would need to be animated would come into the equation from now on.
Scenes like the beginning of the alleyway are examples of this, as the foreground police car would need to be animated in time with the video background.


We also worked on implementing the game options. This was something we planned to do with the 2D demo but found that controlling the 2D characters was much less enjoyable with a controller than with a mouse. This has all changed with the new 3D demo and the inclusion of AC. We can now add in controller support and full keyboard support with the options for camera relative or tank controls (for those who prefer them). This is the first time mapping Dead Heat's controls to gamepads, and I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit giddy at controlling Sonja with an Xbox controller for the first time.

We will continue to work on the new control options and add in as much customization as we can for you. Keyboard and button mapping is planned and we will begin testing soon.


Thank you for reading this short devlog update. A bit of a short update this week, but we are 

We hope to see you next week!

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