Bone hunters Devlog 5

Welcome back to our fifth devlog! This week marked the end of our first sprint phase, keeping us all busy to make a real step in our game advancement.

The coders focused on implementing everything we had and balancing the game, while the artist went for the biggest part of our environment, to make the game starting to look like our vision.

Art

This week, we finished our last remaining character, the pug. The pug was the most challenging of our four little dogs, with all of his wrinkles. But we are very happy with the result and all agree we found his best collar texture possible.

Now the dog-team is complete and ready for rigging and animations. Next to the character, were the foliage textures which we’ve been planning out for a while now. As it takes such a big part of the playing field, it was essential for the feel of the game.

Seeing how those tasks were divided amongst our team, there still is some tweaking to do for the game to be coherent, style wise. At the start there was a very visible mismatch between the bush texture and character. Some minor tweaks were done to make the ground plane and vegetation match.

Along those textures came more complex versions of the props inside earlier blockouts, like Trash cans, Benches and Dog Houses, to make sure we exit the blockout phase of our level.

Coding Department

The end of our first sprint! We managed to create a functioning game loop with a timer and point distribution! At the end of the game, you can see who received the most points! Our point system will still be updated to have some surprises by the end of the game though this part has not been added yet.

To get to this point, we also added a lot more game mechanics: This week we added the dig functionality, of course without animation but the players will also spawn a mole hole when they dig in a certain location so they know they can not dig there again. The way you could poop changed, being able to poop a max amount per bone turn instead of a delay. We also added a new and improved version of the tug of war mini-game. During the tug of war, players will see their icons on the top of the map, together with a slider and in the middle, a bone, indicating who is currently winning the tug of war, making it more visible than our previous idea.

The characters will now also spawn with their correct models attached, as our four characters have now been made! Being able to finally see the art our artists have been working so hard to create inside of our game is really satisfying and created a lot of hype for our team! Slowly but surely it is starting to look like a properly game now!

Controls

Here is our latest version of the controls for Bone Hunters. We decide to go for the trigger as the main interact button, adding an alternating press mechanic to add some depth to the tug of war