This week was the start of sprint 3 – polishing sprint.

last week one of the feedback points was that outside the arena there was just an empty space, so Kirill was assigned the task of filling that empty space. First he added animation to the T1&T2 bow, So that not only the bird moves his wings but also the bow string itself. After that he started filling that empty space.

First, he drew the skybox with clouds.

After receiving feedback from the team, he decided to also try it with cloud meshes, so that the arena had a little more movement and life in it.

He also created the meshes to decorate the background some more.

Meanwhile Inias wanted to rework the arena since the nest was still far from desirable.

The team decided that realism was out of the question and thus it was decided that we would rework it to one of the earlier ideas, the coliseum.

This was not an easy task since we now had to keep in mind the limitations that have been set by other in game elements.

During the creation process it was unclear what the final product would look like and he didn’t feel confident in the designs he had made.

Tribune idea:

Coliseum iterations:

But in the end, he had one that seemed to work and everyone was happy with.

He also did some small improvements concerning the gate and adding blowing sand to give some moor mood and character to the environment.

Michiel worked on polishing and fixing a lot of systems and bugs that went unnoticed in the previous weeks.

He started with adding the new weapons into the game, this required some new prefabs to be created and some scaling and orientations to be done. The code for getting these items as loot was already there but commented out, this has now been implemented within the game.

Damage being dealt now has a pop up that shows how much damage was inflicted on the target so that the player can keep track on how hard he is hitting, who he is hitting and how much damage in return he is receiving.

The new arena was implemented in both the tutorial as the main scene. Code paths and prefabs were readded to suit the new arena space to make sure everything worked as intended.

Next was the addition of a pause functionality for during the game. If for some reason the player needs a quick break, it is now possible to pause the game and resume when you are fully ready. Pausing the game does not take away any vision of the game to enable you to quickly take in the state of the game before unpausing again (Is handy when you are pausing during a tense moment for a longer period of time, as when it clutters or hides the screen it is hard for the player to remember where he left off and this could mean death for his character as soon as he resumes the game).

This pause system was also added for during the tutorial, when the player receives a new task and has to read the information, the game is also paused to ensure nothing happens that is not supposed to, and so that the player can not walk around triggering other tasks while still reading the first one.

A small static text has been added to alert the player to the amount of gates that are currently active in the round. This is a number showing the total amount of gates in that round, this number does not decrease when a gate is closed, as this is the players responsibility to make sure they are all closed completely.

The menu now has a basic controller support, if there is time during the next week, this will change to a better format. But for now this already makes sure the game is fully controller supported and no keyboard or mouse is needed what so ever.

A defence marker has been added to the player HUD showing the player what his defence rating is at the moment of playing. This changes depending on the amount of armour the player is wearing.

The gate animations were fixed after the gates had their prefab changed with updated models. All gate related animations and effects are again working as intended.

The clouds added to the main scene have been given a slow rotation so that they feel like clouds and move around the scene.

A non-consistent bug during the post round has been fixed to make sure no dead locks during the game play.

Lastly some well needed code clean up happened in some of the systems. Some outdated code or unused code has been removed while other code paths have been updated for better use and performance.

The Build

The current build includes the development release of the game. Everything we planned is in the game right now and can be enjoyed. A lot of work went into player feedback to ensure the player knows exactly what to do and when to do it. Animations and effects played a big role in this. There is also a tutorial for those who want to get to know the mechanics before diving into the real game.

We did a lot of work fixing known bugs and improved on a lot of systems. Alot of systems have already under gone a polish pass to ensure a better and more performant inner working. Changes to player feedback have also been made to ensure all information is relaid to the player as clear as possible.