Week 18

This week, I focused on finishing the environment props, retheming them, and exporting them in a way that makes them easy for JT to import. To do this, I lumped the foreground and background props of each environment together for export. Here are a few examples of assets I got done:

Red and blue banners for the field. Serves as a point of reference to help the player discern where they are in the field.

 This is what the red barracks looks like in game...

 And this is a single art asset I exported for all of the red barracks props. Makes JT's life way easier.

 And here's a shot of the blue spawn room.

Each room has a unique prop layout. I reskinned the vases to complement the color tones of the given side.

I've also been working on generating very specific screenshots for the How To Play menu. This has proved trickier than I initially thought, since capturing the right frames in-game is hard, but staging those frames in the editor is often nearly impossible as well. I've settled to accomplish this task with a mix of 'faking it' in the editor and grabbing actual in-game screens.

I've also figured out how to use Audacity to edit voices to sound robotic. First, I added 5 short echoes to the sound file to make it sound robotic, and then applied an equalizer to reduce the base to make it sound tinny. It's not perfect, so I'll continue making tweaks until I make something I'm happy with.

Meanwhile, Shane has been working on the Die-Katana animations. He's finished up the idle and run animations, as well as the normal and special attacks. Next, he'll need to retheme them for the various heads and armors, for both teams.

JT implemented a combat solution this week. Essentially, hit boxes and hurt boxes were drawn to match exactly where a given character or attack displayed onscreen. This was leading to a problem with colliders where weapon attacks had massive vertical hitboxes, and arrows got caught by doors and walls. I realized that if we switched all hitboxes and hurt boxes (weapon hit boxes) to exist on the ground below where the attack was taking place, it would resolve all of these issues. I suggested the fix to JT, and it worked perfectly, resolving some major combat wonkiness, including the arrow collision issue. A big step forward for gameplay!

JT inplemented the flaming head visual effect for the samurai armor, implemented the new armory menu layout that I designed based on playtest feedback, added in the environment props, tuned the katana hurtbox  for gameplay balance, and implemented 'bow charging' (holding the fire button for the bow now charges the bow, allowing the player to shoot a more damaging arrow).

Next week, we'll be implementing the Die-Katana, Sensei's Silks, robot voices, HUD makeover, and the final sound effects.

After that, we'll have a few days to revamp the credits screen, add kill-streak messages, robo-godzilla, and throw together a final trailer. It's going to be super-stressful, but that's life! See you in a week!

Week 17

We've come a long way, haven't we?

This week has been one of those unpleasant 'maintenance weeks' for Shane, who has been cleaning up animation and memory issues within the game -- namely, reducing animation sizes, shifting sprites to align with their shadows, etc. It's a tedious job but it needed to be done.

Meanwhile, I've been working on creating props for the environment and creating the How To Play menu. I also redid the armory for easier initial understanding. I also made the pause menu.

I received feedback from a level designer at Made In Mass who said that the armory had misled her -- she believed she could only pick one weapon or armor. I attempted to alleviate this confusion by adding a small blurb in the armory and changing some background art so show how the weapons and armors are grouped separately. Furthermore, I redid each item description to explain the passives and abilities of each weapon and armor. Hopefully, this will help players hop right into gameplay rather than having to figure out what each weapon and armor does.

I've considered eliminating the armory and replacing it with weapon and armor racks in the spawn room where players could attain new equipment. However, it appears the risk/reward ratio for testing this would be too high at this point in development, and I will probably focus on making the armory as simple as possible for new players.

Here is what the new environment props look like (I haven't converted them for the red base yet):

Meanwhile, JT implemented the pause menu, did other miscellaneous menu implementation work, added our music to the game, and implemented several other sound effects.

Next week, we're planning to add a new weapon and to implement all of the level art I've created into the actual game. I'll be finishing up the environment art and how to play menu, as well as starting to create dialog for the bots.