The End is Near

Hello there and welcome everyone! As we are closing in towards the end of this project we are here to announce that we will no longer be adding new features. We will spend the final two weeks focusing on polishing and balancing the game as a whole. But for now let's not keep you waiting any longer and take a look at the final changes and newly added features of the past week.

More challenges

One would imagine the game to be hard as it is, but for those crazy people who want even more, we have added a new challenge mode. While the modifier is active in the settings, some additional things will be added into the level. For example, the floor will be covered with spikes, so watch where you stand. Falling might mean instant death.

Even without the spikes, the level isn't without dangers. Randomly during the match small oil leaks occur around the map, and while these look harmless, walking into them will slow the player considerably. It's not easy to dodge or jump when covered in sticky oil.

With this setting you cannot trust even the platforms! Most platforms will take damage from various sources, indicated by the white line. Once the line is gone, so is the platform. Get ready to fight in ever more difficult arena, dodging bullets and hazards left and right!

New power-ups

We have added 4 new power-ups to the game, 1 passive and 3 actives. The 3 active power-ups have the following names: Flash Bullet, Power Outage and Freakin' Laser. We will not explain what each one does, but we will tell a bit more about the Power Outage. The Power Outage power-up blocks all power-ups for all players! This includes the player who activated the power-up and it blocks both active and passive power-ups for a few seconds. Sometimes all that's needed to throw someone off their balance is a well timed removal of speed boosts, as a small example.

After adding these new options, this puts us at fifteen unique powerups in the end. These will be the ones we are going to be polishing amongst other things the next few weeks.

While we are on the topic of power-ups, we are considering a cooldown to active power-ups at the start of each round. This would prevent people from using certain active power-ups, like the laser, instantly after the round starts which often could lead to that person getting an easy kill. While we aren't sure of this yet, we'll do some play testing and listen to people's feedback on the matter.

Sound effects

Sadly we don't have a sound expert in our team so we had to throw something together the best we could. That being said, most actions in the game now have sounds! This includes things like UI buttons and menus, player movement, bullet collisions and more. Some actions don't have sound quite yet, but we still have two weeks to add all the rest and tweak the current ones. Also the music and ambient sounds are sadly missing, but no worries, they'll be there soon enough.

UI Changes

The main menu has gotten another update. Players can now look at the controls from the main menu instead of having to start a game and then pause it to open the controls from the pause menu. You might also notice the menu control list on the bottom part of the screen.

The modifiers screen looks the same as before except for one small change. The currently focused slider/checkbox is now highlighted, it's a very subtle highlight but it does help in-game.

New designs

With the new level we did last week, it was a high time for a new background this week. We wanted to have something that would look good and also had a gloomy industrial mood, so we came up with what you can see below. It is very dark which makes the front of the level stand out, while still offering much more depth than the previous endless black void.

We also added a new round start that looks more dynamic. It is also animated

New effects

We continued the endless ongoing effort of adding effects to all things possible. While many things are still missing, all powerups have effects now. Previously it wasn't possible to see when something was activated, but now it will all be clear as day. 

New week we'll look into improving the movement effects. For the moment movement still feels a little bland and needs something more depth to it.

Next week

The next week marks the beginning of the final sprint of this project, the polish sprint. As mentioned before we are not going to be adding any more new features but we will spend our time with stuff like camera shake, balancing power-ups and tweaking the UI where we feel like it's necessary.

That's it for today! We hope to see you again next week for a brand new, and second to last, devlog.