The Finale

This is the last stretch for completing the game! Lots of last-minute tweaks and refinements went down this week, so let's go over them!

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Art

On the art part it really came down to some very minor things. 

We put in some more RFX to help with player feedback and make the game scene feel more alive and interactive. For example, now when a player gets selected, they get a ring of sparkly fireflies around them:

We also made adjustments to the light setup of the main menu screen and added wind trails, god rays, fireflies and fog RFX:

Let's not forget that we also made a complete re-vamp of the itch page as you might have noticed, and also put together a fun short gameplay trailer that we invite you to check out on YouTube if you haven't already! :)

Check out the trailer for Ribbit Rampage!

We also slightly worked on the game UI and logo to make it more painterly and fit the artstyle a bit better, especially the main menu, join menu and game over screen! 

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Code

The camera now zooms out for a short period of time at the start of the game and in phase transitions. This to give the player an overview of what the level layout looks like. The camera movement now also moves towards places in the screen that are important to the players, like the heron attacks and lucky clovers spawning.

When the heron or the player gets hit, you will now still be able to see the underlying texture slightly and it doesn't just turn bright red anymore. Now it will fit in more with the color palette of the environment.

We noticed from playtesting that the wing attack was very hard to dodge and that it felt unfair to players. That's why we made both wings always happen on the same level. Previously when the players tried to escape the bottom wing, they would jump into the top wing and taking damage anyways. The new implementation also gives players more incentive to leave the lilypad's, as they have to in order to avoid the attack. The timings of all attacks also got tweaked slightly.

We added some screen shake to the phase transitions, to make sure that it now actually looks like the ground is rumbling when the platforms fall down in the water and new ones rise up.

We also implemented a bunch of remaining RFX, for example there's confetti in the end screen now! We also made the frogs jump up and down automatically when they win the game.

Another example is that the frog now appears from some smokey-explosion instead of just randomly getting snapped into existence!

As keyboard controls were never meant to be supported in this game and because it had a lot of issues, we decided to cut out support for it in the final release. In the future we might re-add keyboard and mouse support for the game.

Overall, we've made a ton of quality of life changes that, on their own, seem small, but actually can create a big impact! Camera shakes, controller rumbles, tiny visual animations. Some of these are hard to show off in a DevLog, and are best to see for yourself when playing the game.

Bug Fixes

There were still some pesky bugs in the game, these are the ones we patched this week:

- Sonic boom wasn't dealing damage before
- The wings didn't flash red when hit in the third phase
- Players slowed down by water would stay slowed down after dying or being grabbed out of the water by a talon attack
- The hopping animation would play very quickly when holding down the joystick

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Sound

We added a ton of sound effects this week, some of these include: splash sounds for the water, better jump sounds, rumble for phase transitions, and a bunch of others!

The music now also speeds up between phases to add some extra pressure!

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With this last week, we tried making sure everything plays as smoothly as possible while also removing any bugs that had still slipped through. We hope to have improved the overall user experience of playing the game while not changing any gameplay in itself.

And with that, the development of Ribbit Rampage comes to an end. On behalf of our entire team, we'd like to thank anyone that followed along the way. Additionally, we also want to thank both of our supervisors, Alex Vanden Abeele and Ruben Tack for their help in getting this game into what it is and all the valuable feedback and guidance! The entire team is very proud of the result we managed to put out in the limited time window, and we hope you'll have as much fun playing it, as we had making the game! Enjoy! :)