Releasing the game

For the final time we would very much like to welcome you back to our devlog! Before we were able to release our game there was still some last-minute work to do. We have spent the entire week on further improving the player experience, but also on fixing more annoying bugs. For the final game and all its features please check the front page where we have described more or less every significant gameplay element. But let's not wait any longer and dive right into the final updates for Die or Not.

Bug fixes

In order to release the game we had to make sure everything that made it into the game also functions properly. So we did some testing to check if this actually was the case, but sadly nothing was less true. Although we fixed a lot of bugs last week, it seemed like all we did was find more bugs that needed to be fixed immediately. Here are some of the bug fixes from this week:

• Shooting a bullet while standing in front of an opponent no longer breaks that player's bullet and no longer prevents them from shooting again.
• The easy mode power-up was unselectable when there were more than two power-ups on the screen already. This bug has been fixed by changing the way the selection happens. Now the player who can choose the easy mode power-up will get prompted with this power-up and that player can either accept it or decline it and select one of the regular power-ups.
• The game no longer crashes if the first player has not joined into the menu when the game starts.
• Using the Power Outage power-up no longer causes the selected power-up to work incorrectly when they get re-enabled.
• The in-game camera that follows the players did not really like some of our level border textures, because we may have gone a bit overboard with our texture sizes...
• The first connected controller can now also open the controls image correctly.

UI changes

The main UI change we made was the one mentioned in the bugs listed above. So here is a look at the new easy mode powerup prompt.

We also decided to slightly improve our player HUD by adding some input icons so it would be a bit more clear for players to know how certain actions are executed instead of having to open the controls. We have also made the player HUD react to certain events like using or collecting the parry or getting your bullet back by adding a few animations here and there.

Here is an example of how it looks now.

Beside the player HUD we have also done a few changes to the main menu once more. The level border in the main menu now matches with the UI a little better, and we also gave the player controlling the HUD an effect around their character.

Audio changes

All the remaining actions finally have a sounds, meaning things like oil spawning or switching power-ups. Some sounds like bouncing were tuned a little to turn down the annoyance. With a little more variance in the soundscape, everything starts to feel more natural. 

For us, this has been a good area of learning. As we had no experience beforehand, we have learned many new things about sound design, and while we haven't been able to implement those ideas here, our future games will definitely benefit from it.

Developers note

We would like to take this moment to say that we are very happy with how our idea became a reality and that we are thankful to every single one of you out there for taking the time to read these devlogs and for taking part in this journey that we went through together. We hope that you enjoy playing the game as much as we had while developing it.

So, this is it. The final outro. We do not yet know what the next adventure will be. Hopefully we will see you there, but for now we are DON.