Blogs - rtung

What’s new?

This week, our focus was polishing the game before the showcase. A glaring absence in our game was audio; the only sounds we had were an air horn when scoring the ball, and lasers shooting at the player. Now, we’ve added background music, a buzz as lasers fly by the player, and sound effects to the boss. We also added more lighting to our scenes, as the stadium is fairly dark. Secondly, all of our old untextured assets have been replaced to make the game more visually consistent. To add character and story, we added dialog from the boss to the cutscenes. Finally, the boss AI has been improved to make the final fight more interesting. If the boss walks into the ball, this will not register as a "hit" for the player.

What’s next?

While we plan on being done with the game after the showcase, the game feels like it has clear direction if we were to continue developing it. Right now, Dillo Quest feels like just one scene from a larger 3d platforming game. Next steps would be to make more bosses, add overworld levels for players to explore and grab collectibles in, and add more to the story to explain why Dillo is fighting the rock golem.

Build

You can grab the builds here, along with our credits.

What’s new?

Last week, we unfortunately turned in a build with many errors and found that the playtesters could not progress through all the levels. We went through each scene in order to ensure that it properly transitioned to the next one, and made sure that dying resulted in restarting the current level. Outside of removing major errors like this, we attempted to improve the general quality of our game. For example, we readjusted the platforms in the second level to result in a more satisfying experience for players. We also reduced the “slippery” quality of our armadillo model, so hopefully the jumping mechanic will feel much easier to control. In addition, we were able to add more of the custom assets and shaders this week. Now, instead of playing inside a box, our armadillo is in a stadium.

What’s next?

We will continue tracking down the bugs with our movement mechanics and iterating on that so that jumping and gliding feel natural. In our final phase, our player must essentially time their jumps to avoid getting hit with lasers. However, we realize that our indication, a dissolve animation, may not be enough of a “heads up”. We’re brainstorming ways that we can telegraph the appearance of the lasers more clearly, while still making it a challenge. Lastly, we’d like to improve our boss AI’s complexity so that it simultaneously chases the player and avoids directly walking into the soccer ball.

Build

You can grab the builds here, along with our credits.

What’s New?

This week, we focused on introducing more interesting decisions for the player. As of last week, we were still having issues creating a compelling AI, and we found it hard to control the ball. Realizing that our soccer concept had limited novelty and decision making, we moved to more of a hybrid between soccer and platforming. To that end, we created a stadium with a series of evolving challenges that would use all the gameplay mechanics we’ve implemented, from soccer to jumping to gliding. This change necessitated a new mechanic to improve player control of the ball, so we added the telekinesis mechanic, allowing the player to shoot the ball accurately.

We also attempted to add more visual interest to our game via a custom stadium and some shaders. However, we ran into some roadblocks because of the way the stadium’s mesh collider handled objects being inside of it, so we ended up having to scrap most of it for this build.

What’s Next?

We hope to improve our stadium so that there aren’t any issues with collisions. Furthermore, while playtesting the jumping stage, we found that quite a few of the platforms were too narrow to really build up the momentum for a jump. We need to continue testing this phase in order to ensure that it works well with the movement mechanics and vice versa. Finally, with the design of the stage/stage progression relatively finalized, we can focus in on making sure that our movement mechanics feel great in this setting.

Build

Here is a link to Windows/Mac builds, as well as our credits.

What’s changed?

Since our last build, we’ve worked on polishing the game by replacing the generic Unity models with a custom stadium made in Blender among other things. Because most people will be playing the game with a mouse and keyboard rather than a controller, we’ve also worked on improving guidance and gameplay mechanics for that. For example, our tutorial now describes all of the mechanics and uses mouse controls to do so. In addition, because we’re no longer able to provide haptic feedback, we guide the player through visual and audio effects instead. When the armadillo’s tail is touching the ground and the player is therefore capable of jumping, we trigger a particle effect that looks like dirt being kicked up, and play a sound effect. Aside from improving guidance and game feel, we’ve added enemy boids that swarm the ball. Last week, our enemy AI was significantly better than the player at scoring goals. These boids introduce “noise” and make it harder for the enemy AI to win.

What’s next?

Right now, the game just is not very novel. This week, we are focusing on fixing that by merging the current soccer focus with our game’s 3d platformer roots. Among the ideas being floated to approach this are adding platforms and different goals to score into the game, or having a soccer based boss fight, where the player uses their soccer skills to progress in a stage and defeat a boss.

Builds

Mac and Windows downloads should be here but if that link doesn't work, you can also grab the zip from Google Drive.