Hellow Everybody! Join us again this week for weekly update 4 for our game

The Floor is Hacked!

You know the drill by now! lets Enjoy some Synthwave while reading through it all shall we:

Going into this week of production we focused on the setting and feel of the game more while trying to nail down the core mechanics.

That's why for now we decided to continue and work further with one Character head and one Tile type for the playing field.

The chosen starting head and optimized body:

The choosen Tile Shape and how it looks in the grid:

Since our focus was now on making the game look and feel coherent. 

We made sure to Rig and Skin our Character:

And we will use some animations from Mixamo for our character. Below some examples of our Character in motion.

There was a test to make the Shader for our Diegetic feedback for the amount of ammo that is left for the player too shoot.

This will be an important element since the player will be fully relient on this visual feedback to estimate how much ammo is left.

We also mainly focused on how the level and arena itself would look with the help of shaders and particle effects.

We wanted to give the game The main vaporwave/synthwave feeling:

So we gave the surrounding a fitting gradient color while the tiles have a more uniform color. 

and We felt this wasn't enough so we added the classic moving grid under the arena.

this combined with our Character Outliner to show the players who their character is.

Then we where thinking of how to represent the players ammo and amount of rounds won in a cool vaporwave style.

For this we came up with holograms on each side of the playingfield to represent the player and his color. next to it showing the necesarry information. 

And since the aesthetic of our game is strongly reliant on the music genre we also added elements that respond to the in game music thats playing.

this is how it looks when it all comes together In game.

We also looked deeper into the sound design for our Game. Since Time is rather limited and we need Music for our game we looked for a royalty free artist that makes a lot of music that fits our game. We found a candidate for this and his name is Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio
here is a link to his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_6hQy4elsyHhCOskZo0U5g

and the tunes i picked for this week are also his.

together with the soundtrack for the game and the levels we also had our first hand at shooting sounds for our guns. 

Than for the mechanics of our game we implemented
The programming of the gun:

The gun has finally be implemented and added so now the character can shoot bullets depending on which pick up has been interacted/touched

The programing of the ammo pick up system:

There are two types of ammo pickups, each have access to their own bullet types and they both differentiate by its color and ammo size and of course the functions.

The impact on the tiles:

Like previously stated there are two types of ammo pickups, one that shoots a normal bullet and one that shoots a cluster like bullet, each of these bullets will hit the tile and destroy it on hit, so far there is only one type of tile that only gets destroyed by one hit, but in the future we decided to add more types of tiles that for example get destroyed on two hits.

The ability to play with 2 players:
When the game starts two characters will now automatically spawn 2 characters. You now need two controllers to play .

The Game loop:

The game loop works like this:

You start and for now you can just play, but we intend to show the main menu screen, then you can choose for play, settings, … . When you press play you can choose the amount of players, the looks of the players, then the game will start.

so then, we are playing and the first player who gets three wins, wins the game! each win is indicated with a light above the hologram (of the player).

When the there is a winner for now the game stops, but this will have to change of course. We still need to figure out what will happen. 

And with all this here is a final video of the game when u start it up.