Welcome to the first devlog of our second sprint! This one is a bit shorter than usual as most of the work went into improving current systems and fixing bugs. After this week, there's the Easter break so there will be no devlogs for two weeks.

The Artists

Kiril mainly designed UI this week. Working further on Lukas's initial sketches, Kirill designed the game over screen.

Kirill also worked on the Post Round UI which gives the player a new armour piece or a new weapon. It also hands out power-ups to the player if the player doesn't have three already.

After he finished the Post Round UI, Kirill started working on the in-game HUD. Since we had already a somewhat finished HUD from the prototype phase, it's mainly a case of improving the current design. The current work in progress design still needs to be discussed with the other team members.

Inias made quite a bit of progress this week by bringing the arena to life with small decorations, some animations and by adding a shader.

He started by testing out the Animation Manager made by Michiel, so he could continue work on the player and level animations. The level decoration task was the least exciting one, but the most relaxed. Inias created some assets and started to fill the level with them.

Then there's the shader that adds a black outline to all the assets, adding a whole other dimension to the atmosphere of our game. It was a risky choice of Inias to start working on the shader, and the team agreed to look into it more during the Easter Break, but after seeing the results, it seems like the risk payed off. The shader immediately added something that was missing and is in the current build.

The Programmers

Michiel mainly looked at the current mechanics to see where improvements where needed and looked into how to better develop them. He also gave a lot of feedback and helped with fixing bugs here and there to make sure everything worked and we could move forward with the project.

Finally Michiel looked into balancing the weapons a bit, in terms of speed, animations and visibility. To make sure the attacks are more enjoyable and obvious for the player. Some of those changes were some more negative effects for the player when doing the heavy attack, as it was still unclear what the difference between the light and heavy attacks were.

Lukas first started by improving the Camera Shake script, so it was more usable for other programmers and didn't require to be passed as a reference in the editor.

Afterwards Lukas looked into fixing the issues with two of the PowerUps, which are now resolved. The Bird Arrow took longer than expected because Lukas got stuck with finding the closest bot. in the end it turned out the problem was calling the method in the Awake() method instead of the Start() method.

Lukas then went on to implement Kirill's Post Round UI in Unity. This took much longer than expected, mainly because working with Unity's UI system is still very new to Lukas. Regardless the end result is a working interactive UI. Depending on the loot the player has got, the Post Round UI looks a little bit different. Currently there are no animations, but Lukas is planning to add some audiovisual polish in the last sprint.

Last but not least, Lukas looked into balancing the bots more. They are now a little bit less aggressive and are now more forgiving when the player is using a ranged weapon.

The Build

This week the build mainly contains visual improvements. While there are systems that are ready to go, they still need to be integrated with eachother before being added to a build. The controls are the same as last week.

Up Next

Up next is the Easter break, so the next devlog will be published in two weeks. By next devlog the programmers will focus on making sure there are no bugs anymore while the artists will continue making new assets.  Lukas and Michiel will look into balancing the mechanics and will let the artist playtest to also get their input.