Hello Reader,

As mentioned in the last Devlog, the focus of this week (and by extension next week) is on polish up the game. Sadly for programmers, this means that we cannot show a lot of images because most work has been done “under the hood” But I’ll try to explain it to the best of my abilities without boring you.

What have we been working on the past week?

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

 Sound system

We had a sound class before but it was not exhaustive and expandable.  I changed the code the bit, the sound system is also persistent data now meaning every time you start the game back up the sounds and their settings are saved. The reason for this will be clear in an upcoming paragraph.

Settings menu

Jannis worked on a settings menu this week, this menu allows you to change the volume (That is where the persistent data comes in handy. We don’t need extra code to transfer it from one scene to another and the sound settings are saved each time you start up the game again.

Difficulty manager

Our game supports some difficulty options, previously the code for this was once again all over the place and hard to change it. I centralized this, it allows us to add more difficulties in the future if we want to, but most importantly it is easy now to number tweak the game. The distance you travel is now also determined on the difficulty instead of being a constant amount.

Falling boulder

There are 3 things changed about the boulder: It has particles when it lands, it makes the ship go down and it swings.

Jasper did the particle effect for this, so the particles are going to be shown in the artist’s section.

Last week one of the leads mentioned that it does not feel like the boulder has some weight to it and they recommended making the ship dip a bit when it is hit by a boulder. This is exactly what I did, to see this effect you need to play the game because it is hard to put it in a gif.

Boulder swinging, previously when the boulder fell it fell straight down. Right now it still falls in 1 axis, but it swings a bit from the left to the right. This adds more reality to the boulder mechanic.

Engine smoke

Jasper made a smoke particle effect that comes, I placed it on the oven and also added some kind of “wind” to the smoke depended on the speed of the ship. If the ship goes fast the smoke will have a lot of velocity to the left, if the ship is almost out of fuel and not moving anymore the smoke will practically go straight up (You know, how smoke works in the real world).

End screen

Jannis worked on the end screen again, and now you can see how many times you have done things instead of the total amount. This gives you a better idea of how you did and you see what actions are useful to do and what not.

General bug fixes and number tweaking

This week we spend a big amount on playtesting our game, with this we found a lot of bugs like: when holding a box when you eat food you cannot throw the box, boxes do not respawn correctly, music volumes were not implemented correctly, etc..

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

Scene lighting

The lighting in the scene before this week was dull, but it got the job done. Yano worked on this and the scene looks a lot better now.

BEFORE

AFTER

Setting screen

Yano made the setting screen buttons, at the start there was a different layout

Sound effects

Jasper added different sound effects this week, some of them are: eating, bird call, engine whistle, etc. To hear these effects you should play the game. 

VFX

Jasper worked on the VFX again

BOULDER

ENGINE

FEATHER

Engine model

The engine we had until now has never been changed, Yano made a new engine model and it now does not look out of place anymore

Bird Target

The target on the ground was also something that has not been touched since it was implemented. Yano made  decal for this and it fits much better in the game.

The focus for next week?

- Fixing a lot of boulder interaction, make them less hard

- Menu screen feedback

- Completing ship texture

- Modelling new bird

- ...