Recharging

After some recharging during the Spring break, we got back into our programming seats and worked on the following:

• Playerfeedback (quite a lot already!)
• New cannon!
• New pickups!
• Bug fixing (as well quite some)
• New meshes (not the programmer)

Let’s get to it.

Playerfeedback

First of all, our hook has received a wire now! This has been done by using the line-renderer in Unity. No more invisible wires connecting the hook and the player! We also added a new arrow showing you the direction you are aiming at with your special cannon. 
Also some little flags were also added on top of the mesh to showcase the amount of lives left of the player.

Some particles were added too. This helps giving you a sense what is actually going on. 

We also added an outline to our pickups, making them a bit more clean and noticeable as something special.

To brighten up the mood a little.. COLORS! This makes it easy for players to separate them from their opponents.

And last but not least our first sounds made it in the game! Let’s face it, without sound, your game is dull and feels empty. We mostly find our sounds on the source SoundBible.com. And we adapt them a little bit to match the effect that we need. Current sounds that are implemented are for some cannons, pickups and a small sample for the background music.

New cannon

We added a mine cannon! This cannon can drop mines that will slow down the enemy (or yourself should you choose to drive over it) a lot! This is a good counter for those who picked up a speedboost. Or against those who are chasing you with the lasercannon. You can however destroy the mines by dropping a bomb near to it. When it detonates it destroys all mines within its blastradius.

New pickups

Wall and towerhealth pickups have been added! Since walls are there to protect the tower they can still be destroyed. By adding the wallhealth pickup they can be rebuild one by one. The weakest wall always gets repaired first. The same kind of pickup is the towerhealth pickup. The name says it all, it heals/repairs the tower.

Bug fixing

Yes, this was needed. The hookprojectile was a major issue concerning collision. For instance, when hooking onto an enemy player and getting stuck behind an obstacle caused the player to go through obstacle, which had no floor beneath, causing the player to sink through the floor.  How did we fix it? Well, we just destroy everything that’s in the way for a long enough time while being hooked onto an enemy player. Maybe not the cleanest solution, but this does make the environment dynamic.

Also when picking up a speedboost, you were able to go so fast that our collision detection with obstacles was too slow (in a matter of speaking). After some messing around with the code, we found an option in Unity to put the collision detection continuous. Solving the problem.

New Meshes

Never have to little amount of meshes.. Our artist added the following mesh:
 

We added meshes for almost all the pick ups in the game. The only one that is missing is the pickup for the mine cannon, as well as the mesh for the actual mine cannon. A bit behind in pace, since all the non environment meshes should have been done by this week, but with one extra week for this production sprint still very doable. After the meshes for the mine cannon/projectile/pickup are done we move onward to creating the environment. Different workflow will be used for this to create a nice contrast between gameplay elements and background/playingfield.