Hello reader

Time goes fast, we just finished up the last week of production, after this point we are not going to put new things in our game but we are going to polish up the things we have.

What have we been working on the past week?

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

 Boulder mechanic

This is the hardest mechanic we have in the game, there were some bugs with it (like 2 boulder spawning on top of each other). Spawning the boulder on the left side was a pain to remove it, so I implemented a bit flag (that can be used for every disaster) which we can decide where it is able to spawn and where not. Spawning on the left is now disabled, this makes it much fair for the player. There are now 3 areas to spawn in when a boulder spawns this area is disabled until the boulder is thrown off the ship. If all 3 areas are used the boulders only spawn in the middle area. If this sounds complicated to you, no worries. The image below will make this clear.

TLDR: Boulders spawn in reachable places and only once in small places.

Tutorial level

Last week we had a tutorial level that was playable with 2 players. In our meeting on Monday, we decided to roll back on this and only have a 1 player tutorial because playing a tutorial that teaches the mechanics with more than 1 player is not necessary and will only make it more complicated. But did you hardcode which player plays the tutorial? You might ask. No, Jannis took the selection screen for the main game and altered to a one player selection screen where 1 of the 4 players can join.

The tutorial level now also explains how the engine works, and with this, all the less intuitive mechanics are explained in the tutorial level.

We spent a lot of time fixing bugs here because player1 (and player2) were hardcoded and references were made in the editor, but this does not work if the player gets spawned via code.

Selection screen

We got new art for this (Go and check out the Artists section). The leads commented that we should not allow everybody to have the same suit color. Jannis fixed this problem and after some playtesting and fixing glitches, where we could still have the same suit and players were not able to join the selection screen, the selection screen now fully functional.

Difficulty settings

The game was hard to balance for everyone, for some people it was too hard, for some people it was too easy. We now have 3 difficulty settings and they are (in order): Lead, normal, hard. Jannis did most of the logic behind it and Yano made the buttons.

Master singleton class

Our code was all over the place, we had a lot of singletons and it was hard to spot bugs and glitches that way. Especially with scene swapping. So I started on a master singleton class which should be the only one in the scene. This solved a few problems and also made it that we are using fewer monobehaviours. This is still not finished but the refactored coded we have now made debugging a lot less complicated.

General bug fixes

This week a lot of time went into fixing errors. Sometimes the player did not spawn correctly, sometimes the score was not counted correctly. A lot of bugs were not consistent, meaning sometimes it happened and sometimes it did not happen.  

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

Character selection screen

The art for the character selection screen made by Yano. The Gif Also shows how you are not able to select the same suit.

Difficulty buttons

Buttons made by Yano

Props

Some extra props to brighten up the scene made by Jasper

Particle Effects

Jasper worked on new particles to replace the old ones, one of these finished particles is the burning on the ground when the ship is damaged. This is not in the game yet because it gave errors and we did not have enough time to finish it.

New buttons

Last time Yano gave us some buttons but we still needed some so he made them.

The focus for next week?

We have not decided it explicitly what we are going to do. In general this is going to happen:
  -  the programmers are going to fix bugs and clean up code. 
  -  The artists are going to optimize and meshes, textures and particle effects.