Killing too many darlings

After applying the technique ‘Kill your darlings’ (a technique where you dispose a lot of your features), we were informed that we killed too many. So once again we decided to change up our gameplay. This slowed down our progress, as time had be spend on brainstorming, creating our new mechanic and testing. Let’s see what happened this week.

Our new mechanic

So after some brainstorming and some testing we decided we’d go for a shooting-system where you, as the player, would start as a castle, with one neutral cannon. This cannon simply fires regular projectiles and remains static on the castle’s balcony. Aiming happens by moving towards your target. This makes using your default projectile only useful when charging in the direction of the opponent, but still gives you the option to fire when no other weapon is available. When is another weapon available you ask? Good question! So, we had a default cannon attached to the castle’s balcony, while the other three special cannons are attached on a ridge just above the castle walls. These special cannons can be rotated by using the right analogue stick. You can only use them by collecting a pick-up. However, you can only use on the three cannons at a time. Shooting this cannon is done by pressing R1, changing between the other special cannon can be done by pressing R2 or L2.  Once out of ammo, the cannon will be disabled and a new pickup is needed to fire.

New projectile: The hook!

We added a new projectile called ‘the hook’. Once collected, the cannon firing this hook will be activated. Once fired onto a pickup, this pickup will be pulled towards you, being able to collect pickups from a distance. But that’s just a side ability. When hitting a player with this hook, you will pull yourself towards the opponent at a high velocity, crashing into him and applying a lot of damage.

Managers

Compared to our prototype of two weeks ago, we need managers to maintain and hold structure in our code. A game manager has been added, controlling the spawning of the players and initialising then with ID-data. A sound manager is added as well. This way, a sound can be played easily when a certain event happens (sound itself still has to be implemented though). And lastly, a pickup managers has joined the club too, dropping pickups at random times. Visually, you’ll be seeing red balloons dropping on the field containing a pickup, dropping it and fly up again.

Main menu

 We developed a main menu, currently without any art assets. it contains a start button to start the game (and  later to set the amount of players and game settings), settings to set the current volume settings, a controls button to view the controls on the different input devices, credits with the makers of the game and credits to the people that helped in the project. And finally a quit function to exit the game (or the play in unity).

The menu is setup through a lot of unity inbuild help tools and a menu behaviour script. First the audio settings were written in code, but later we got to know the functionality of the audio mixer in Unity, which made it possible to make things a lot easier, without adjusting the code in our sound manager script. Currently the control submenu is “under development” which requires a little photoshop work.

Art

The visuals of our game are steadily progressing. Some tweaking was and still is needed to improve the readabilty of the different meshes, as they are quite far away from the camera and smaller details get lost. 3 Special Cannons are done as well as their respective projectiles. Next week its time to finish the rest of the castle and therefor complete the playable character of the game. Standard cannon, outer walls and the base are still missing

The meshes and their materials work really well upclose, but thats not the game view.

And now in game view. Some meshes need some slight tweaking. Some gradient maps still cause the materials to get too white, which needs to be fixed. The workflow is still not 100% ironed out and quite a bit of time is lost by really unnecessary mistakes, but this will most certainly get better as we progress.

Despite our time put into reinventing our mechanic, a lot of progress has still been made. With approval, next steps should go very smooth.  As always, we look forward to the last week of our second sprint!

Greetz,

The dev's