Week 06: Production Sprint 1 - 3

Hello peeps, this was the last week of Production Sprint nr. 1!

Here’s how it went:

Get some movement in

Even more animations were made!
We now have an idle, movement, dash, pickup and throwing animation!

Particle effects:
New visual effects were created for impact punch, explosion and pearl trail:

Shake it off

Continuing on the shaking pearls from last week:
It works! *Celebration noises* We told ya we'd get there ; )
The way we fixed the 'offset issue' is the following: we still give a random offset in a unit sphere to the pearl every frame. But now, every new frame, we subtract the previous offset again before we calculate the new one. This is a simple solution that works very well, since we don't save the 'original' local position anymore. This would mess up the behaviour when picked up and such.

Extending the real estate

We noticed that the arena itself was too small to fit our chaotic gameplay. Furthermore, we have also thought of bringing back some old mechanic ideas. That's why we reworked the whole thing! It's larger and can be divided into multiple segments. This gives the players a lot more space to work with, you won't fly off after being hit with one pearl. Stay tuned for the returning mechanic!

Up we go!!

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, we have been thinking of bringing back some past ideas to improve the overall game play.  The overall idea was  that when pearls explode, the map gets damaged. The more damage the map takes, the smaller it gets. It will be visualized by the map gradually losing its bottom layers and fall down. Because of that the whole map rises to the surface of the water.

If the map reaches the waterline, gameplay gets exponentially harder to the point where the enemy is not the only thing to worry about. At this point the map has also become a lot smaller so even a little knockback can send you flying.

As we had not tested this idea out, I took it on myself to do a bit of testing on how it would look. Currently we have the map destruction where the peals damage the map and layers of the arena gradually fall of. This was all thanks to how the new map was separated in layers so much thanks to the artist responsible. 

Next, I also tried my hands at the water surface since I have never tried it before. All I can say is that it was hard and thus I went and tried some Unity Assets and see if there was one that would fit perfectly with our style. I eventually landed on this 'https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/urp-stylized-water-shader-prot...' asset which looks to do the trick.

Since this was only testing it should look different in the future but you should get the big picture.

There's a start and an end

We've also been working on the different menus, we're still unsure about having customization screen or not. But right now we have a title screen/main menu and a pause menu!  The color customization right now is located on the main menu, but this might change along the way. Furthermore we have added an indication whether the controllers are connected or not.

Improve the feeling

Last week we've gotten the feedback that mechanics should feel nicer. The supervisors recommended to play around with the Dash.
We decided to let the Dash charge up. You still Dash when you press the button shortly, but it's a small force that you can use to dodge your opponent's attacks. When you hold the button, you can feel the controller rumbling, signalizing that the Dash is charging. Once you reach the max charge value, you feel a spike in the rumbling of the controller. If you release the button you dash way stronger than before.
The Dash feels great. It doesn't punish you for not charging to the max amount, because you still dash... just... less. and it feels very intuitive and rewarding because of the rumbling. Win-win!
Also, we decided that you should drop the pearls when you dash, to make it seem to heavy to dash.

We researched a bit on what makes combat feel good and we stumbled upon this masterpiece:

We figured it would be a good idea to implement most of these effects, don't you think?
Whenever you punch someone, the player that is hit will now flash white for a very short time, to indicate that a succesful hit has landed.
You all know and love that moment in fighting game where, when you hit someone, the game seems to freeze for less than a second, right? Well... we implemented that as well. We might have to tweak the time of it a bit more, but overall, it feels quite nice.

Show the real impact!

To add some more visual representation to the power on the mantis shrimp we have overlayed a particle effect on the punch animation. Its currently three separate particle effects that happen simultaneously 2 at the front of the fist and then the are bubble  ring around the  fist itself. 

Return to sender!

Wanna destroy your friend with skills? We got you!
Whenever your opponent throws a pearl at you, you can try to punch back at them! We chose to let the player be able to spam the check for countering, because in a chaotic gameplay session, you already need to: 

1. Pay attention to when the opponent shoots the pearl
2. Position yourself towards them
3. Hit the button before the pearl hits you. 

Having it this way makes it feel more responsive.
It was quite tricky to make sure the pearls doesn't explode in your face first, but we managed to prevent. And we must say: its' quite robust.

Know where you're at

We also have gotten  the feedback that, at some points, it was a bit hard to know where your character is. We are working on given the separate players separate colors, so stay tuned for that ; ).
What we already can add, is an indicator at the side of the screen when your character flies off-screen. The little arrow also turn smoothly towards where the player is located. We'll admit that right now, the indicator doesn't seem very useful. That's mainly due to the fact that the camera moves around a lot. To see the indicator, you'd have to fly really far. We have of our programmers working on new and better camera movement, so hold on to your pants.

Practicle visuals

It was also time to put some of the amazing works of the artists into the project.
The clam is now more alive than ever. It slighty moves when it is open to give some life to the scene. You can now actually close the clam for real as well! Finally...
Dammit, it opens again after sometime...

We can't have an action game without explosions, am I right? The pearls now activate the explosion particle effect when detonated. When flying across the stage, the pearls also have a trail following them. We had to adjust the size of the partciles a little bit according to the size of the pearl, but the effect itself is perfect!
Looks good, doesn't it?

What's next?

Next time, we will start production sprint 2! We have some exciting things to work on. There has been discussed to bring the map destruction back, but with a twist. You'll have to wait and see what this might be ; )