Weekly Update: Week 5

Polish

This week, everything has revolved around polish. While the differences with previous builds look plenty, most of the changes have been where you can’t see them. Bug fixes, UX enhancements, artwork optimization and so on. The result we got was a more enjoyable experience that lives up to being an easy-to-learn game with little to worry about.

Major Additions

Even though optimization was the major thing this week, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been all-new additions.

The store in checkpoints are one thing, you can now use the coins to actually buy meaningful things. There’s still a lot of work to do to balance these things, of course.

The change in theme is about the most notable thing when comparing to the previous build. Before, we took the standard mobile like theme, so that meant a colourful palette and low-poly, shape oriented models. When someone took away the main light in the scene, we were immediately sold on the new theme. We all agreed on the fact that it just fits better for the type of game we wanted to create. In that area, there is still a lot of work to be done as well.

Here you can test the new build.

• Team17

Prefab nesting

While building a level this week i started noticing that some of our prefabs have been broken. This was because these prefabs existed  out of objects that also where prefabs. And prefab nesting doesn’t work. So i started messing around on the side looking at ways to fix this problem. Why do we need it fixed? Well if we want to be able to build levels quickly we will have to have obstetrical prefabs. groups of predefined objects that we only need to rotate and or position.

Other then that I have mainly been working on my level and looking for bugs and improving code.

Implementing the store

So this week I have been working on the in-game store. This allows you to upgrade your ship and some of its parameters like how much brake you have or how fast that brake recharges. This opens up a new way to play the game since it will not be possible to achieve victory without really upgrading your boat. Unless you try a dozen of times, that is. The store pops up when passing a checkpoint and gives you some time to buy things. For now, you can upgrade your vessel indefinitely but that’s a balancing issue for later.

The UI of the game has been reworked as well, a new font has been added and the HUD now looks different (it makes more sense). This is to enhance another important factor in a game; the UX or user experience. This has been reworked based on some feedback I got from friends.

• Yoni Van Gucht