Introduction

Oh boy, Oh boy! It feels like we're taken leaps in the last few weeks.  
We've been waiting to release this devlog because we're loving the progress that we've mast last week.
Most of them give the game a more "complete" feeling, which is always a good sign! 

Without further ado, as we would say in Dutch "Let's fly into it!" and commence with the devlog!

New Character Models

Slowly but surely we're getting there! Our last two character models are now in the game. The doll and crocodile are fully integrated and working, with all of their animations. Just like with the other models, we got the animations from Mixamo but surely didn't forget their personality. As the crocodile is a Frankenstein creation of different doll parts, his animations are more zombie-like. The doll on the other hand has a very athletic run, accompanied by a strong and stable jump (even with those high heels! Deamn girl...) 

The models currently aren't textured yet, but that's something you can look forward to for next week.

Main Menu

There is a new main menu, with even more stuff to play around with! All players can now get accustomed to the mechanics in the game before even hitting play. The Play and Quit buttons also got a visual update to better match the theme we're going for.

Score and Winning Screen

The game loop has become more entering. Sick of always reselecting your characters and keeping count of your wins? Say "Bye Bye!" to that annoying process and say hello to the scoreboard! As long as you restart the game the score counter for each player will be remembered. What does this mean? This means you can now flex on your little bro by having a higher score than him! Heck yeah! 

After the match is over a winning screen gets displayed, where you can see how many matches each player has won. On this screen you can either choose to play another match (in a futile attempt of your brother to win) or go back to the main menu, to let someone else join and/or change characters. Apparently, there was also a slight bug with our previous build (sorry for that). The winner shown on the winning screen wasn't always the correct one. This should now be fixed in the new build!

Character Selector

First of, there are now character icons in the selector! This way you don't have to guess which colour represents which character.

We edited the UI of the Character Selector to avoid confusion. Some buttons weren't correctly mapped to the keys shown on the screen. This is now the case. 

On top of this, we made a small QOL change to starting the game from the character selector. Previously the game would instantly start if all players currently joined were set to ready. However, they gave us some annoying issues. If an extra person wanted to join, the game would already start and that person would have to wait until the next round. (which sucked of course ...)

Now, we made it so that the game no longer starts instantly when all players are ready. After all the players are ready, you have to press the START button in order to start the race.

Sound

We advise you to play the game to take a listen to all the newly added sounds. There are now sounds for the spring, running, jumping, and wall sliding. Some however are still quite buggy, especially with the slo-mo effect at the end.

 (And yes... we know, the jumping sound is pretty annoying atm, we'll change that asap)

Making It Look Pretty

Where once there were just basic white props, there are now beautiful textured props. We aren't all the way there yet, but it is starting to look pretty good. There are also some different effects for the objectives and main menu buttons, to better match our style.

Pathfinding

The pathfinding used to calculate the correct path for the pathfinding seems to have some small hiccups.
It has proven to be more challenging than expected but our programming team is driven to find a solution as soon as possible!

Although a lot of bugs in the algorithm have been fixed, some still remain, which causes the wrong path to be chosen.

To help the debugging process, some text showcasing the distance to the objective has been displayed as shown in the image below.

(This image has been taken in a prototype build. This is why it still uses the old visuals)

As the final deadline is creeping closer and closer, everything is processing smoothly. We will still need to have a lot of rough edges to polish and that's our goal from now on! Feature-wise, most implementations are finished (except for the pathfinding). All that's left is making the experience as enjoyable as possible! Hopefully, you've enjoyed this week's devlog. C YA!

-This text was funnyfied by uwu Gilly & Senne-