Hello again, dear readers!

The final week of our first Production sprint is coming to a close, so lets take a look at where we are.

Not without some beats of course...

We made some significant visual changes to the game since our last update, improving the readability of the game. For this we focused on making the characters and the playingfield our main focus. Changing the camera was also a major part in this.

We also did not implement the holograms on the sides of the field to improve the focus on the gameplay. The idea would be to still implement it in a later stage of the game. But in what way is uncertain at this moment. 

A  first draft of the ammo meshes which will be shot with a certain ammo type is here. They both have the aesthetic and feel of viruses. bacteriophages in particular.

for the default ammo mesh we took a more aggressive shape since this ammo's intent is to destroy the floor tile immideatly. 

for the second and more powerful ammo we choose a more bulky/heavy shape since this ammo type implodes on impact releasing a shrapnel of smaller bullets that destroy multiple tiles at ones. this is our cluster bomb in the game. This is also why we reduced the amount of ammo you get for this to 5.

The times of simple blocks for our ammo pick ups are over. We designed new ammo pick ups to give a better visualization of which ammo type you are picking up. The ones for the default ammo are green in color and the shape is more elongated to show the same ideology as the bullet mesh itself. The split ammo pick up is more bulky and has a nice animation showing off its intend.

All the designs for the ammo pick ups:

and here are the choices for each ammo type.

default ammo:

split ammo:

The animations we saw last week are now fully functional and in the game.

There was also a first pass on the post processing which balances out the colors and make them feel richer. Within these post processing effect is also the feature of colored outlines for different players. This to better differentiate from one another while playing.
Below a quick look at the difference and the outline on the players.

The in game music also changed. We tried to give it less of a dark feeling. 

We also worked on particle effects for when the gun is shot. For this we want to implement a ribbon trail behind the bullet and a small effect when it is shot. We also are leaning more towards the use of pixelated VFX. for this we created a material that pixelated textures you give to it.

The trail:

the effect coming from the muzzle:

for the impact we want to implement a glitch effect with slightly distorts the colors around it.

this is only the first pass of this effect and needs more finetuning for actual implementation in the game.

A basic HUD placeholder was also made to show how we are thinking about representing the information a player needs. This is also a first draft.

On the programmer side of things.

We made a visual representation for the ammo indicators so the players know which type of ammo is equipped. for if they need a quick reminder.

To give the player a second chance while he is falling too his doom. We wanted to implement a ledge grab which makes it so that the player can grab and recover to the playing field for a short amount of time. But nothing prevents the other player to shoot that tile as well. 

The speed of zooming in and out while the camera transitions from zoomed in too zoomed out is made smoother too prevent motion sickness in players.