Bone hunters Devlog 9

Welcome to our 9th Devlog! This week we’ve started our polishing phase. We initially began by getting ideas of what needed polishing and improving. Our next step was to handpick from these ideas by deciding what should be prioritized. Next we’ll go more in depth about what we’ve improved on this week!

ART: 

In this first week of the polishing phase, the artists started refining the assets that required some more love. For example, the tiling grass texture looked a bit dull and uninteresting up until now. It’s looking way better now with some variation and fake 3D elements.

The sky was looking a bit boring too, in the startup screen. So that's why we created some shaders of clouds in the background, together with some wind shaders on the foliage to make the scene feel more alive. Simple but effective.

And last but not least there was level decoration done in both scenes, from implementing animations on the start screen, to fixing clipping issues.

PROGRAMMING: 

One of the first things that came to mind about what needed polishing was the Tug of War, as this was the main aspect of our game. We started by making an animation for the camera to move towards the Tug of War location instead of the jump we had before. One of the things we noticed was that it wasn’t always immediately clear who had won the Tug of War. We made some improvements by adding controller rumble for the winner as well as displaying the Bone Pickup RFX on the winning player. Screenshake has also been added to the Tug of War to add to the feeling of the Tug of War.

Aside from the controller rumble added when you win a Tug of War, we’ve also added rumble in the character select screen. This applies to both joining the game and locking in your character.

We also wanted to make the transitions between the level and the other scenes less harsh so this week we’ve added a small intro animation to the scene to get the players ready for the game and introduce them to the level.

One of the obvious parts of polishing is also fixing any bugs that we run into while playtesting. One of the biggest bugs we had noticed was that players who were stunned or frozen during Tug of War would keep their moving animations as opposed to having their idle animations playing, This has since been fixed!

This week we’ve also made some changes regarding sound! The menu theme and main theme have been updated. The first set of sound effects have also been added to the game in the form of barking! All dogs now have a barking sound effect whenever they attempt to bark at the dog that has the bone! Other sound effects that have been added are: growling during the tug of war, a disappointed bark when the dog is not able to find a bone after digging, a jumping sound, some digging noises as well as joyous sounds when the dog finds a bone and drops one off. The UI now also has sound, switching between buttons in the start screen and the menu screen as well as selecting now feels more impactful. To implement all of this we needed to make some changes in our sound manager design so that it is able to choose from an array of random sounds, for our sound designer has really been working hard and added a lot of variations. 

We have also added controller vibration for some events, like locking in your character, digging up a bone and dropping off a bone. Other rumble effects will be added as needed.

One last thing we did was add some more variation in our scores. We wanted from the start, to have different playstyles to have different impacts on the game. Maybe you are not good at the tug of war game but you always manage to stun the other players to delay them, or you are the lucky one and always manage to find those bones, this is has now been implemented and although it needs a bit more polish, it is way more fun to see the results of your strengths appearing on the endscreen!