Ahoy everyone, Miguel here!

Hope you all had a great week, 'cause today we bring you a lot of fun updates! This log sets the end of our 2nd production sprint, so for the next 2 weeks we'll just be polishing what we already have into the funnest possible version of our little game - and after that, we officially launch Fish Fiasco!!

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. For now, let's get into what new stuff we bring you today.

Art:

Alex split their time between working on VFX  and drawing the victory screen and UI.

In terms of effects, they did three separate particle systems : an electric zap one, to warn the players that they'll get stunned once the electric eel activates; a cartoony "dizzy" one, for the actual stun, consisting of stars rotating around the player's head; and a simple collision effect.

For the victory screen, they created small winner and loser icons for all 4 potential players and designed the layout of the screen itself.

Lastly, they drew the icon that announces the tiebreaker round and quickly created our missing 'start' game button.

As for Stjin, this week he focused primarily on animations. He created a jumping animation for the Ground Slam, a belly tackle for the BellyBoost, a knock-out fall for the stun and the death animation.

Aside from that, he also did a couple of new VFX - namely, a sweat drops particle spawner for players to better visualize the ability cooldown, and a new improved version of the Electric Eel safe-zone (to replace the one from last week). This new version of the safe-zone is no longer driven by the Unity Particle system, but it instead consists of a custom shader on a circle-shaped 3D mesh. The reason he made this new version was due to the fact that meshes are much more flexible when it comes to in-game implementation.

Lastly, Beau did a bit of rigging, animation and VFX this week.

To start off, he made a frame by frame animation for the waves that hit the back of the playing field, which fit really nicely into the game!

After that he dedicated most of his time to rigging both of the fish models and working on their animations. This included 2 model animations for the Puffer Fish (an idle and a post-pickup) and 2 for the Eel (a slithering and shocking), as well as a 2D "big lightning" VFX to clearly show which players get stunned by the eel.

Other than that , he also tweaked the rain particle a bit, although he's still gonna work on it in these next weeks.

Programming:

Moving onto programming, I'll start off with myself! This week, I ended up focusing a lot more time on coding than sound design, compared to last week. I did this to make sure our game was running as best as possible for the official end of production - but don't worry, during polish I'll definitely be composing a couple of new tracks and sound effects to really bring our game to life.

A big chunk of my time was spent implementing the VFX and other visuals our artists came up with in these last weeks . This included the Belly Boost dashing lines Stjin composed last week, as well as his cooldown sweat-drops particles and his Eel's safe-zone (both the old and the new versions); Beau's rain particles and wave animations; and Alex's Start Menu background, as well as the cute score HUD and all its animations (which took way longer than expected :') ).

Once done with all the visuals, I focused on bug-fixing - to polish up some of the rougher corners of our game.  I started off with a very jarring bug that somehow sneaked past me last week: if the game ended while a wave was getting ready to spawn, the flashing warning that proceeds it would malfunction. Once with that fixed, I revisited the pause and player disconnection screens, since they used to overlap bizarrely. Lastly, I made the playing field not tilt until all players are spawned, since otherwise players could clip through the floor, as well as freeze the wave and fish spawning.

With all the coding done (at least the one not related to sound), I finally focused on the sound! Starting off by composing and implementing 3 new sound effects - one for the waves, and 2 for the stunning effect (one for each type of fish). Working on the stun sounds also led me to tweak the way the fishes flash before activating, making them progressively faster (and, the sounds it plays, higher pitched) as to underline the sense of urgency. Then, to finish up the week, I spent a couple of hours working on the whirlpool theme track - it's still in a very early state, but I think you'll like it once done!

Last but not least, Daphné! She spent around half the week making sure the spawn selection system was really nailed down and worked smoothly, as it needed a couple of redesigns.

After that she helped Stijn figure out how to handle the death animation properly in the state machine, as it was surprisingly trickier than other regular animations.

One of her larger tasks this week was making the new improved victory screen logic. Getting it fully functional took a little more work than expected, but in the end it came out looking very nice! 

To wrap up the week, she spent a couple of hours bug-fixing, like myself. This included making the waves properly freeze at the end of rounds, since only their visuals used to stop, not the actual tilting effect;  resetting the player's velocities on re-spawn, since their velocity sometimes persisted after death; and, one of the rarest but most bizarre bugs we had, stopping the player from flying off the map randomly on re-spawn.

And that’s it for this update! I hope you enjoyed reading this long post, because, with the polish phase starting, there won't be many more of them haha

Until next week!!