The halfway point of production

Welcome back everyone to another update on the production of Die or Not. As the title mentions this devlog marks the halfway point of our production time. This means that our team gave it their all to complete as many planned tasks from this production sprint in the best way possible, to ensure we stay on track to deliver a fun, working game for you to play.

Bugs everywhere..

The last week's build was very buggy when playing multiplayer. This time we hopefully did better with the testing and have a playable demo ready.

Joining the game didn't work very well previously, so we revamped the whole thing. Now you can start the game with any number of players, and can actually select your color by joining in an order. Everyone likes picking colors, right?

We also noticed that the bullet redirection wasn't in the last build even though we said so, sorry about that. The most integral part of the gameplay is now finally part of the game! Hopefully to stay this time.

New features

Main menu

Since the previous main menu was really bad even for a placeholder, we made a menu that is at least a little easier to use. And now, you can also jump around while waiting for your friends! We'll replace this menu with the actual one during the polish sprint within a month.

Robots break

For more graphical news, we finally have a death effect. It's not exactly polished yet and is missing some particles, but it gets the idea across. Gradually the arena fills with the oil splatters so you can track who of your friends dies the most. The effect looks like a decal, but it is actually drawing into a runtime virtual texture, which allows us to save some performance and apply better shader effects.

Parry

One of the last abilities, parry, is now included. You finally have a way to defend against those flying bullets, but only once so be careful. With a right timing, you can bounce the bullet back before it kills you. Defensive game strategies might even be possible with some skill.

Pickups

What would parry be without a way to gain charges? Maybe better but we still included a pickup in the level. By stepping into it the player gains a charge and the pickup enters a ten second cooldown. Those little dots under the ball show the current progress for the next spawn, so keep an eye out for it. 

Power ups

A bit larger concept we finished this week is the power up system. After the round end the dead players can pick power ups from a random selection, but those who died first get a priority in choosing. For the moment the values are just placeholder since we need a lot more testing and feedback to balance them. 

The power ups are divided to two categories, passives and actives. Passives are always active from the moment you pick it, but are also usually less effective than the actives. Some might even change the gameplay for you specifically. Actives on the other hand have to be activated as the name says. These give strong bonuses but come with a long cooldown. We only have one rare active power up in the demo, but we will add more soon enough.

Hopefully by the next month we'll have some actual icons and UIs for the power ups too but for now we only have these placeholders.

More art stuff

This week, we have been working hard on rigging and animating the character for our game. We hit a few bumps in the road when we couldn't export the FBX file with the skeleton and animation properly from Maya, but we're determined to figure it out and get it into Unreal Engine for testing. For now, here are some of the animations (idle and shooting animations).

We've also been working on the model for the bullets and the creation of some textures for them. They may be changing in the future but for now, here you go!

The special effects

We added special effects to indicate gameplay mechanics such as bullet bounces (perfect and regular) also the bullet trail is visible now so it's easier to track the traveling bullet. The bullet bounce prediction also has a marker now. Take a look!

We also designed the background of the level a little bit further right now it is just a sketch but it gives a good overview of what to expect

We managed to get a fair bit of progress in this week, and if we continue the same rate we'll get the game done by the deadline.

We hope to see you all next week where we will be able to share even more updates and changes as we enter the final production sprint.