Devlog 9: Polish part 1

Hello everyone welcome to the weekly update of our game, we are starting to approach the end and our game is finally coming together.

After the production sprint of last week we got started right away on our the polish sprint, this meant that we could not add any more features to our game. So without further a due we will share some of the polish that we added over the last week to our game.

Level design

During the playtests we noticed that alot of players easily got stuck on geometry in the level. This made the level feel cramped, small and frustrating.  Because of this we reiterated over the level design to give the players a bit more space to move around. To facilitate these level design changes and to make the gameplay more fluid we also implemented a limit to the arc the characters can jump. But more on that in the programming section ;).

Programming

During the first week of polish the programmers focused on fixing small issues present in the game and adding some small nice features and increasing the flow of the gameplay by restricting the player aiming.  And lot of small tweaks and fixes have been made to the crown behavior and some animation fixes. We also added some screenshake when the train in the character select screen arrives and departs.

Aiming arc

One of the most important changes this week together with the new level is the limit on the aiming of the players. Now the players have a maximum aiming arc of 180 degrees. This way players can't jump to the surface they are already standing on, this makes it much harder to get stuck on geometry.

Rumble
Another nice feature implemented in the game is the addition of rumble. This gives certain actions in the game more impact. So after reading the post be sure to play the game to test this awesome feature as it can't be shown in a GIF ;).

Sound

We have searched for some sounds to give the game some more player feedback. the sounds that where added, where sounds for the arrival and departure of the train, some impact sounds, sounds for all the abillties of the characters. We also found some voice over sounds that count down from 3 to 1, a sound effect for the trampolines and much more.

Art

A set of animations was made to give more life to the game world and menus. 

Train arriving

When you arrive at the character select screen, the characters also arrive by train!

Background cars

During play cars will constantly pass by in the background, because what's a city if not for horrible traffic? 

Bouncing title screen

The menu has also received some panache, The title card bounces a little and the buttons will grow and shrink when highlighted.

(don't mind the controls button, he will receive his facelift very soon)

Shuriken Visibility

The Shuriken Star was made a little more visible, as requested by our feedbackers, the texture was changed and given a little bit of shine.

We have changed some of our pictures in the art bible. This was done to make it even more appealing and to show our intention with the art style. This was done by going in the unity project and making some nice screenshots. the screen shots where put over some of the pictures that where less fitting for our style.  

Character animations

I tweaked the character animations a bit to make sure their a bit more snappy and overlap better with the geometry