Hi! Been awhile, but after a 2-week easter break we’re back with a new update post.

Programming:

Miguel split most of his time this week between programming and sound design.

For the programming part, he started by disabling the wave spawning during the whirlpool round, as it looked weird to have both active at the same time.

After that, he added the logic that handles the player disconnection. Now the game will freeze and wait for a reconnect before proceeding with the match. This feature also included adding a pop up screen that appears, informing the players who disconnected, which will display a 3 second countdown after reconnecting. Following this, a new feature was also prepared that allows multiple players to disconnect at the same time. He also did the implementation for the visuals of these features.

Lastly, he also added the logic for the tie-breaker round. This includes the activation of an extra round if 2 or more people have the same score after the regular rounds end. In this round the map will shrink as the round goes on, assuring there will always be 1 player coming out victorious. 

For the sound design, he spent some time learning FL studios to understand how SFX mixing and simple track composition would work.

Daphné spent these past weeks on refactoring fish, level and manager code. After that she also spent some time refactoring the movement code of our characters. Maybe not the most flashy changes but definitely equally important!

Finally she spent some time on the UI, implementing the start screen and some other UI elements.

Art:

Alex spent their weeks on redrawing and cleaning up our game’s title screen which now features a small rotating ice cube. They also created a font that will be used for our in-game text. This will allow our in-game text to have a similar aesthetic to our main menu screen and start screen.

Besides all the 2D stuff, they also made some changes to the atmosphere during the whirlpool round to reflect the stormy environment. Adding some fog, obscure the village with clouds, creating an overall moody atmosphere.

And finally myself. I spent these past weeks on updating the water shader to include a toggleable whirlpool effect. This effect can be toggled on and off by the programmers during the whirlpool rounds and allows for a pretty flexible implementation of this effect.

Besides that I also did some work on the animation controller of our characters to create a correct flow of animations from idle to walking and then up to running.

That’s it for this update! From now on we’ll be back to weekly posts until the game is finished. Thanks for reading and until next week!