The first week of Polishing

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Art

This week our artists team started focusing on the little details to really tie the game together and make it feel nice and finished! Let's take a look at some of the various improvements that were made:

In order to add visual interest to the scene, we re-worked and added some more RFX both for the environment and for the characters. An example of some environmental ones we added is the firefly and mist RFX !

Some of the other RFX we've been re-working are the one that signals the boss's health going down, one that will play when a frog gets selected at the start, and the little trail of smoke left behind by the frog when jumping, both doubling as some extra player feedback!

We also gave a complete re-vamp to the player death animation. No more lengthy falling on the back!

And to go with that we finally added a much needed animation for the last of the Heron's attacks!

We also changed up the UI! The Heron's healthbar and the player's hearts now fit a bit better with the look of the game!

And the frog's attack RFX has been recolored to fit with the theme of the frogs's colour scheme.

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Code

In general, the game should overall feel a bit more smooth, as we changed some linear movement to non-linear, there's even more of this to follow in the next week though! Now, onto specifics!

First of all, more feedback! Apart from adding some more auditory and visual feedback, we also added haptic feedback. During events of the game, such as creating a Sonic Boom, both of the player's controllers might shake a little, giving that extra feeling of impact and strength. There might be some more in the future as well!

The lilypad's now behave a bit more like the normal platforms, we've added some feedback to them. When a frog jumps on a lilypad, it will slightly drop down a bit to make the game feel more alive!

We made it so the lucky clover now actually smoothly (but quickly) disappears, instead of just getting removed from existence in a snap.

We also added a cute little extra to the Main Menu screen. Every now and then, when on the title screen, the second frog will peek in from the sides to come say hello, before promptly leaving again.

Also, when the the camera moves from the title screen to the player join screen, the frog will hop along with it and wait for it's friend at the end of the lily pads.

We also added some movement to the scene, by making the platforms slowly move around, even if the player isn't standing on them. The plants and trees also move left and right randomly, as if there's wind blowing through the leaves. This makes the scene feel a lot less static and it helps to add some depth as well.

Bug Fixes

- Lucky clovers now despawn when a phase transition occurs, as otherwise they would not be on a platform and just float around during this period.
- The players now no longer triggers various effect when being dragged through a platform by the talon attack.
- The players can now no longer jump/move on each other's death bubble and the heron parts.
- The end of the heron leg model is no longer visible if the leg extends too far.
- The walking animation no longer plays too quickly when the player is in the water

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Sound

We added a bunch of new sound effects to the game this week. These include new juming sounds, walking sounds, a sound for when the heron attacks using its beak and some more. Play the game to hear them :)

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This weeks marks the first week of our polishing phase, as you can see we're improving a ton of things about the game visuals & clarity wise. Next week will unfortunately be the last week of Ribbit Rampage's development, we'll keep putting in hard work for 1 more week to continue polishing the game and ensuring we end up with a result to be proud of. We'll see you next week, for our final DevLog!