Polishing the game

Welcome back to our devlog everyone! The goal of this last sprint is to polish the game as much and as well as we possibly can. This means we have spent the most of past week on adding a lot of extra details, some finishing touches one might say, but also on fixing some very game breaking bugs. If this devlog took as long to read as it took our developers to figure out what was even going on sometimes, yeah we would be here for a very long time. So let's not do that and just stick with an overview of what the team managed this week.

Bug fixes

Sadly most of the time this week was spent on uncovering some very well hidden bugs that would randomly either crash or soft lock the game. One such bug prevented everyone from changing their active power-ups and another crashes the game when players input certain series of inputs at a specific time. These took a long time to find and debug, but now we can happily say that most are also fixed.

Of course, not every bug is game breaking. Many were just some visual effects that were played at a wrong time, non-updating navigation mesh, or movement that doesn't quite feel right. Generally, we feel that the game experience now is a lot better compared to last weeks.

Tutorial

That's right, the game now has a tutorial. Or at least something along those lines. We tried to improve the player experience by adding an option in the modifiers menu that enables tutorial prompts about certain actions in the game. These prompts pause the game and wait for the player to respond with the correct key, teaching them how to use the features. Currently dashing, redirecting bullets, perfect bouncing, and parrying have tutorials, but we are not planning on adding more since those already teach the basics and the rest is just through experience. Also, the tutorials disable themselves so no need to go through all the unnecessary pauses each time.

Sound effects

Almost all actions and events in the game now have sounds, even more so than last week! Some still require little tweaking but generally it is playable without experiencing too much discomfort. We are still a a bit unsure about the music theme of the game, but that will be resolved very soon.

Player Immersion

We took some time to add some extra details for certain actions happening in the game. This extra details consist of things like haptic feedback and camera shakes. Let's take perfect bouncing as an example, we already had the VFX and sound for perfect bouncing before but now we have added a short but pretty strong haptic feedback and a camera shake which scales in intensity based on velocity. Adding these extra details is pretty easy to do because we are using GameplayCues from the Gameplay Ability System plugin which we can execute using a tag anywhere we want it to be played and then, if we want to change something about the dashing for example, we can just open up the Dash GameplayCue and update the VFX or haptic feedback from there. Everything's pretty handy when decoupled this much.

In this weeks version, we are trying a new camera system. During the game the camera turns slightly to follow players and bullets on the screen. It feels a lot different from a static camera, but the effect might be too much in some scenarios. We also limited the movement so much that the borders of the level are always visible. Wouldn't want to lose the bounce prediction!

New effects

We added more visual effects to the game and polished some of the ones that we already had. The oil spill particle system is much more visible now and an FX that plays when players are affected by it has been added as well. (Right is the old effect, barely visible as you can't see)

We decided to add a blood splatter FX as well when a player dies to spice things up! It complements the background splash well so now neither appears too suddenly. Moreover, at the start of the round players will be immortal for few seconds to prevent too powerful power-up combos, and an FX will play when the immortality is active.

As you can also see from the above gif, the platforms now react to impacts that damage them by flashing red for a short moment. This makes it a lot easier to tell when a platform is getting damaged and might alert the players of danger.

Apart from these and few more effects, the player movement effects are now fully implemented! Moving around it's now much more satisfying: running, jumping and dashing all have implemented effects that play accordingly! You can see some of them in the gifs below.

Next week

For the final week we hope to add some animated UI, more VFX and fix even more bugs. Also since our team is lacking a sound designer we have always been prioritizing art and programming tasks because that's what we're familiar with, but this time there is no escape anymore so we will also finally be adding music to the game and main menu. And last but definitely not least we will try to do some balancing of our power-ups to make buff or nerf them accordingly.

Alrighty, that's the end of the second to last devlog! We hope to see you again next week for the final devlog of this project.