The Second Production Sprint Continues

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Art 

For this week, the art team focused on player feedback and in getting the game closer to what we had in mind. We found some RFX and re-worked them to make sure they are in line with what we need, fit the aesthetic and are clear enough so players won't be confused. Our brave programmers then spent some time implementing them in the game. 

We also made some more animations for the Heron! Croakie and Ribbie should watch out for those now grabby talons and dangerous wing attacks! The player death animation, talon claw RFX, talon grab/release animation, and more have also been added to the latest build!

We noticed that players might get confused when first starting the game as of now, so we decided to add a handy-dandy controls screen to make sure all possibilities are clear and our little frogs get the best chances of survival!

We also working on the visuals of the scene, the background texture, background layered assets, foreground and platforms all contribute to the environment look and it's important to take care of the cohesiveness between these assets, there's a lot of back and forth to match values, color and detail amount so the scene works well as a whole.  

The background is a simple soft painted texture with planes layered in front with tree and vegetation atlas textures. In addition to that we make sure they all blend together and push them back visually, by putting a layer of mist.  

The platforms have also been textured as well as the water animated texture.

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Code

This week, our programmers mostly spent implementing RFX and adding more player feedback. In this week's build, it should be way clearer what is going on in the game. 

The attacks now have more of a warning for where the next attack will appear. We added a visual signal coming from the direction the heron will attack. For the beak and talon attacks, we also added a shadow appearing where the attack will end up, to give the player an even better idea of how it should move to evade the attack.

We've implemented the effect for when you land on the ground so that we have some player feedback for this as well now!

We also added a bunch of player feedback to the lucky clover mechanic. A lucky clover will now spawn with a sparkle to make it stand out, upon picking it up, a frog will get an effect to indicate they're holding a lucky clover. In the next week we'll also make an image of the other player appear in the thought bubble, to make sure the player knows that they have to give the lucky clover to the other player. We've also implemented a shield effect for when a player gets given a lucky clover.

We finally got the sonic boom behaviour in there as well! We already had this working for the prototype, but had not yet implemented in production. Now it's here though! Fully functional. In case you forgot, colliding two soundwaves generates a sonic boom, knocking back players within range and dealing big damage to the heron.
As you can see, the soundwaves themselves have also gotten a fancy new look provided by our artists. The aiming was also tweaked to make it easier to accurately shoot a target. 

Another major important thing for our game is UI! We (finally) added player hearts to the HUD to clearly indicate how low on health your little frog is. We also slightly tweaked the boss health bar to look more appealing. The beautiful hearts were of course done by our artists!

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Sound

This week we've also found the soundtrack for the main menu. This music isn't in the game yet, but stay tuned for next week or our polishing sprint to hear them!

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Next week marks the end of our production sprints, after that, we'll be moving on to polishing, where we make sure our game feels good to play and we add a ton of user feedback and other things like sounds! We hope to see you then!