Hello and welcome to the first week of polish! After last week, we finished production and started on polish. Since it is sometimes hard to know what counts as polish, we had think carefully and plan out everything we wanted to do to improve the game. After receiving feedback from play-testers and our supervisors, we decided to focus mainly on combat during our polish sprint.

Art

Hi and welcome to this week in art! I gave our environments a big overhaul and they look much more detailed now, and keep losing that low poly feel more and more ! Not only the big plateaus but also the trees and mushrooms got a face lift.

Also the shrines are finally fully functional and to celebrate that there’s a cool new mushroom circle area on our map that swirls around one of them

Other than that, I’ve been really busy giving the player some more visual cues about the gameplay. If this guy comes staggering towards you, you sure know he’ll put up more of a fight than your ordinary enemy.

This week one focus was fully set on visual player feedback. Different effects were created and then added to the project. At first a healing effect was created. It shows the players that they have been healed at the moment the effect appears.

Furthermore the healing effect was adjusted a little so it can be used for the shrines. The shrines are objects in the level that heal the players when close enough. The green crosses symbolize here that the shrine is currently active and that the player can heal at that specific shrine.

Moreover a simple dash effect has been created that leaves a quick trail after using the dash function.

To help the players understand when they were hit a “being hit” effect was created. It’s a small burst that illustrates having taken damage.

A running effect was added as well to give the players the feeling of actually running around the level and actually being on the ground. It’s a flashy burst that leaves some smoke behind.

Further, the light of the lanterns and small parts of the level were adjusted to fit the mysterious and magical style a little more all together, including a more densed fog at the edges of the level. When the camera zooms out quite far the area won’t be simply left in complete darkness anymore.

Programming

As mentioned earlier, one of our main focuses this week, was to increase clarity and improve the combat. We started this off by first adding some haptic feedback (controller vibration) whenever you successfully hit an enemy to make sure that the players know when they successfully attack. Furthermore, we added a flicker of red on each enemy that the player hit to make it clear which ones in specific it was that they hit.

To further improve combat clarity, we added a miss effect for when the enemy does not hit the player, so that the player can know more directly when they successfully avoid attacks.

Furthermore, we added an indicator for starting new waves by adding a progress bar (seen in bottom right) So the player is not simply waiting not knowing what is happening.

Alongside this, when new waves start, instead of just spawning the mass of enemies right away, we added a small indicator (which currently is a debug cube) to where the enemies will spawn in.

To improve the gameplay feel, we also fixed some more bugs, primarily centred on the combat. For example, in our previous build it was possible for the enemies to try attacking the players when they were on different layers, and thus allowing the players to essentially freely sit in an area without any danger.

Finally, we added camera shake whenever the tether disconnects, as to indicate more clearly what the tether actually does. And more innately incentivizing the players to stay together.

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!