Previous week feedback

So last time we dropped a lot of our features, but got informed that we killed too many and decided to change our gameplay and see what would happen this week. We are happy to say that we made a decent progress this week and finished most of our gameplay features.

One of our feedback last week was that we should not start doing a menu system before the whole gameplay is in a finished state, so we had to put the menus on hold and focus on the core gameplay first. We were expected to deliver a playable game by the 27th of march and we are quite happy that we think we did just that to showcase our teachers.

volcano game mechanics

We started working on one of our initial ideas for random events during the gameplay, a volcano eruption that would shoot fireballs on the playing field that would cause damage to the players that would get hit by them. The fireballs shoot from an original position to a destination position that is random within the playing field in a parabolic way. Each fireball touches down on the ground in a different duration  and the location where it is going to hit an the map is indicated by a placeholder mesh currently.

Some progress down the line

We added an environment manager that generates procedural environment, which places a volcano and randomly positioning mountains.

We also added a restart functionality, a respawn and dead system (each player starts with 3 lives), and also checked out how we can make a temporarily winning game scene. 

We heavily modified the shooting behaviour script which caused us to lose A LOT of time into creating a new structure for the shooting behaviour. Previously, our player contained a script called shootingBehaviour. It contained all the separate cannons and their own functions to fire.
The shootingBehaviour had to keep track of every separate cannon whether or not they were firing, having a cooldown, ammo count etc..  This has been changed by adding a cannonBehaviour script. So that every cannon does all these functions themselves. This came with a cost of course,  a lot of time went into bug fixing, but especially into adding the functionality that you can switch between the active cannons,  that if the cannon in between two other cannons will be deactivated, that the object knows: hey, there is an empty inactive spot between these two cannons. So we can add the next new cannon right there.  

Some other good news, our harpoon works fine now!

First particle attempt

This week we attempted to make our first particle, but we haven't had the chance to add it to the game yet. 

Art side of our game

A lot of work went into implementing all the art assets and positioning them correctly.  We have new meshes for pickups, for the player, for our environment, etc...  We are very happy with the quality of work our artist Dominik Pilz has brought us so far!

This week he finished the player character, so the castle meshes for our game. He also reworked the bomb cannon to make it more fitting in the theme of our game, he reused the previous bomb cannon for the simple static cannon we have.  He added two variations of the wall meshes, gate and wall and also added destroyed counterparts of these two meshes. Beside that he also cleaned our textures and meshes, he reworked the balcony to make it more interesting in silhouette. 

for the next sprint Dominik still has some textures and values that still need some tweaking. Some details are still getting lost which needs to be released. Next week and for the start of the second production sprint he will start with the environment meshes and hopes that he will get them done early on.

Despite putting much of our time into bug fixing, we made a lot of progress and finished our first sprint of production, up to the second!

Greetz,

The dev's