Hello and welcome to the final week of production! It has been a ride working on this project. There were ups and downs, struggles and moments of joy, but we finally made it! We have managed to create a finished product that we can be proud of.

Art

Hi, artist Lorena here! This week you might notice some pretty big changes again. The scale of our characters vs their environment seemed way off, so I spent a lot of time tweaking the environment to fit. This unfortunately also meant I had to place all foliage and rocks again by hand, but in the end it was way worth it. Our layout should now be pretty much finalized with the exception of some special areas! You might also notice some brand new assets. I finished the shrine model from last week and also some scary spikey looking stairs. With Milena’s new fog particles, the shrine definitely looks like a welcome break from fighting enemies. It’s also now easier than ever to tell our siblings apart from each other because I gave our second sister a new hairstyle and her dedicated colors that can now shine brightly on the battlefield. And last but not least for my week, you might see something real scary lurking in the darkness. A basic enemy model is rigged and animated, stay tuned for more enemy art updates soon!

For this week the environment has been developed even further and was changed more into a mystical and magical scene. A few added textures and meshes as well as effects have greatly improved the look and feel of the world. Every small change in foliage or textures are greatly noticeable.

The textures have been finalized and added to the according assets as well as changed if necessary. The only thing left is to change the base color of the texture accordingly instead of using the tint function in the material. Like that we have way more control over the textures.

Furthermore a path has been created to give the players an idea about where they can continue walking instead of getting stuck at the edges of the map. Of course the players can still walk around freely but with that path it hints the possible way that can be taken. To lighten the path even more lanterns were added that lighten up the area around them. It helps the players to orient even more but doesn’t light up the area enough to lose the mysterious aspect.

The general atmosphere has been worked on as well. Not only were particles, that fly around the scene, but also fog added to make the scene seem more magical and mysterious. The vision feels blocked and unsafe but the particles give light and hope. Balancing that out was part of the progress.

Programming

This final week in programming, we finalized the enemy’s potential movement patterns. The enemy now on spawning-in are assigned randomly one of two movement patterns: the basic homing movement which was used up until now and then alongside this we added the movement pattern of enemies trying to go in between the players, and then hitting them apart from each other (as shown below).

Furthermore on the enemy movement, we changed some innate parts of it to prevent the enemies clumping together and forming conga lines when approaching the players, therefore making the gameplay largely more dynamic rather than just sitting there watching them follow the row. As shown here:

As could be seen in the gif as well, we worked alongside our artists again, to implement the animations and indicators for our new enemy mesh inside the game itself.

We also implemented code for the “health-pool” system, which will in some waves of the game enable healing pools around the shrines our artists have made. The code is nearly completely function, simply needing some polish and will be added in our next build.

Lastly, we fixed a large amount of bugs that were present within the game in our prior builds. These bugs include:

• Enemies sometimes spawning under the level, effectively softlocking the game due to not being able to kill them and progress waves
• The wave-spawning system sometimes creating enemy waves, thus once again softlocking the game due to no observer call being sent to start the next wave to the wave-spawner
• Players being able to be stuck in geometry when they fall off the ledges we introduced with our height variations
• Both players and enemies launching very far off the ground when going up slopes and being attacked
• The weapon hitbox of our players being inconsistent on reloading builds
• Enemies being unable to be attacked at times

Sound

Audio wise especially, I can say that I am definitely enjoying the results of my mix. During this week, I mainly occupied myself with implementing the remainder of the sounds that needed to be in our game. These sounds mostly consisted of footsteps and attack sounds for both enemies and the player. We have also decided to add a healing shrine that heals players when they get close to it. This provided me with new sound design opportunities that I hope you will enjoy. The second half of this week was spent on the overall mix of our game. This covers everything from adding reverb to our sounds to give them a feeling of being in a space, balancing the different volume faders of every sound, to adding a limiter on our master track to make sure that everything remains under control. You will find a picture of our entire audio hierarchy below. Thank you for tuning in this week. Hope to see you next week for the final polish week!