Hi everyone!

We are now in the 5th week of developing our game and coming closer and closer to a finished product! Asset production is still the main focus for the artists while the programmers are working on features to add to the game as well as fixing issues with gameplay.

Our progress so far

Art:

The artists started making the effects for the game and the animations that are needed for the game. (The effects are not yet implemented in the game) The artists also kept continuing with balancing the game, so that there are no spots where a player can "cheat". Now, the artists are thinking about making more different platforms (qua shape) to design the level and making the design less repetitive. Next to that, the artists will start making mid-ground elements to make the visuals of the game more appealing.

Programming: 

Pickups can now be global and affect all players, can spawn in various locations. Timer uses both hands to point out the time of the players on the clocks. Quality changes made to previous code, making it more easy to initiate the timers for every player and add more pickups. 

One of the playtesters previously gave us feedback that it would be a good idea to indicate some dashing information. Which we did this week as a dashing orientation indicator around each player.  This was implemented using a child-parent relationship to keep track of character transform. The feature seems to be really useful as this reduces some confusion some playtester had as now they are able to see where they heading if they were to dash . The indicator also increased the visibility of the character on the screen, which is also good. Inputs and dashing ability were tweaked along the week to give a nicer movement experience. Although it seems better, we have not reached the exact result we'd like to have. Therefore it still remains on our to-do list. In order to avoid some camping behavior in our game that we have seen last week from our playtester, we introduce a wall bump/bounce to discourage the behavior.  On collision with boundaries area, the character will be propelled in the opposite direction. Next we integrated the idle animation of our current character into the game. The integration took more time than expected as the animation was not defined relative to the origin.

What are our next steps?

We definitely need to focus on making assets in one area of the game. We now have a bit of everything; pickups, environment tiles, characters, traps... But now we need to complete one of these fields as fast as possible to move the project forward at a steady pace.

Level design is always a work in progress, as we need to keep testing our level for gameplay and still make it look nice!

Tweaking certain features such as movement, dashing, the effect of the pickups and so on, is key to getting the best possible experience out of our game as well.