Hello reader,

This week we cleaned our game up a bit, there are no additional disasters added but everything right now is a bit smoother and works better. The art of the game also got an upgrade.

What have we been working on the past week?

------------------------- PROGRAMMERS-------------------------

  Disaster selector

Right now everything happened at the same time and worked independently from each other. The bird strikes at an interval, you lose fuel at an interval, the boulder drops at an interval. This makes it hard to balance and makes the game way too chaotic from the start. That is why I made a disaster selector. Everything bad that happens to the ship can be selected by this object. This means that the disasters happened in sequence (but random order). If we want to crank up the difficulty we can just decrease the interval of the selector, making everything happen way more often. In the picture you see below you see the different places the disasters can happen.

Bird strike

It seems like every devlog there is something to say about this disaster. Last week (and also the weeks before it) we noticed that it is hard to hit the bird. If the bird flies fast you will almost always miss it, also the bird that you throw at was the first bird in the scene, so not the closest to you.

I fixed both of those things, the throwing box now seeks the bird every frame, making the box always hit the bird. For this game, it works fine because the bird moves in a predictable path. The target you throw at is not at random anymore but it is the closest target.

Jannis made sure that when the birds hit that the ship that they get destroyed properly.

Because taking a screenshot of it is impossible, enjoy these boxes.

Interaction button pop-up

Last week it was brought to our attention that it is hard to know what the player had to do. We, as veteran players, new already how the game worked. Because we want to be friendlier to new players we added a “B-button”-image above the character when he can interact with something. The image represents the b-button on the controller of course.

Animations

Yano made animations for the main character, I used those animations to create an animation. The player now has animations for idling, walking and interacting. Those animations make the game already look more polished.

Win and lose state

Winning and losing looked the same,  most of the time when the game resets itself you had no idea what happend. Jannis made a distinction between winning and losing the game.

Point system

What is a game without points? A point system gives the players the incentive to play the game more, improving each time they play. Jannis took it upon him to implement it now we have a game where every action of yours matters. Reaching the end matters, removing obstacles ASAP matters, having high health matters,... You get the drift, playing the game as well as you can result in better points.

Menu scene

We now have a menu screen, Jannis made this, it is really simple but it works. When starting the scene you have a nice transition. 

More player feedback

We got feedback from the leads that it still hard see what happens for example: being low on stamina or the fuel of the ship is almost out of fuel. Visuals for both things are added now. Yano made UI elements for this and Jannis added the "brains behind it"

Low engine:

Low on energy:

Other

Most of the things done this week are fixing bugs, cleaning up some code and making the interactions work smoother.

------------------------- ARTISTS -------------------------

 Main character

This week Yano rigged and animated the main character, and also unwrapped it so we could use only one material per character instead of multiple.

The rigged model:

A quick glance of possible animations:

Character material, 4 different kinds:

UI Elements

Yano made all the UI elements that we needed this week: The apple, the B-button, and low fuel icon. Here they are in high resolution.

The airship

Jasper worked on upgrading the ship model and adding some textures to make the ship look better.

The Ship

The focus for next week?

This week was the last week of our sprint, meaning we have no open tasks. The first thing we are going to do now is sit together again and talk about what needs to happen the coming 3 weeks.