King of the Crown: Post Mortem

After an entire semester of blood, sweat and bugs
our work on King of the Crown has concluded.

It was difficult at times, with some weird bugs, ability redesigns, character redesigns etc.
But all in all, it was pretty fun. We learned a lot on how to work in a team. 
The artists also learned a lot on how to use unity, because they barely used it before.

Game design:

The niche movement in our game brought a lot of unconventional game design philosophy with it.
This meant that we came across some problems with our level design towards the end of the game.

We realized that using rounder platforms was probably the way go.
The smoother geometrical shapes helped reduce problems like being stuck in a part of the level.
And we had to limit the arc in which you can aim/dash,
to prevent players from accidentally dashing to the platform
they were already standing on.

Character Abilities:

The different character abilities were difficult to create and a lot of bugs had to be fixed.

Shuriken
Creating the shuriken was pretty straight forward, we just had to make a bouncing projectile that can also damage players.
However adding the 2 extra projectiles and allowing the shuriken to be thrown in an arc was a bit more difficult.

Ink
We had a lot more trouble with making the ink ability.
When designing the ink spots we first thought about putting a layer of ink on the platform, but with all the corners etc. on the platform that turned out to be more difficult than we thought.
So in the end we instead used a 'cloud' of ink.
At first it was also rather difficult to hit a player with this ability.
To solve this we made the ink able to catch players in mid-air, dragging them to the spot where the ink lands and then releasing them in the ink spot, causing them to be stuck in the ink spot for a couple of seconds.

Hedgehog
At first we were going to make the hedgehog roll along the platform it was on, damaging and stunning all players it hit.
But this turned out to be very difficult to hit and extremely buggy.
So we completely redesigned the hedgehog's ability and now the hedgehog shoots itself in the direction it's aiming.
Then the hedgehog flies trough the level like a pinball, damaging everyone they hit.
This can also make the hedgehog very good utilizing a 'hit & run' strategy.
The hedgehog can get the crown and then just use their ability to quickly shoot across the level.
Of course it can also be risky, because there might be a platform that just bounces you back to the other players.

Frog
We do not talk about the frog.

Environment and game look:

At the start of the project we decided to go for a neon Tokyo aesthetic.
However this proved rather difficult to apply in a stylized brawler game.
All the different neon lights in the scene were also rather distracting,
so we had to tone down the lighting in the background a bit.

Although the player visibility is not where we really wanted it to be with the limited time we had and the limitations of implementation of different coloured additions(colour trails, added emissive meshes, colour specific effects, etc... ) it has come a long way and we are pretty happy with the end result of our look.

UI DESIGN AND ANIMATIONS

This one was also a challenge for us, as the artists had not had a lot of experience with unity yet. A lot of the UI animation is handled with State Machines, which took a while to figure out as even though these are built into unity, a lot of the functionality is still tied to scripts, which caused the programmers to have to log some extra precious hours.

All in all it was a fun experience to make this  game and we would like to thank each and every one of the people that took the time to play this game.

Thank you for playing!