Time for a new sprint

As the team moved on to the next sprint stage, things needed to be changed around and scrapped, since time is a resource that needs to be taken in account. Even tough it can be painful to scrap something that has had so much work put into it, it is a great reminder to look forwards, not back. As more and more elements are added to the game, it is truly changing and adapting to become something (hopefully) beautiful.  The previous sprint provided some great lessons in planning and scaling things accordingly, so hopefully this part of the production will go much more swimmingly, as we have experience, and likely many lessons to be learnt lay just ahead.  

While there are many mechanics that still can be implemented, the current game is the baseline of all the mechanics to make the game fun. Some tweaking of numbers and some polish will add it up to becoming a thrilling experience between friends and family. This means the developers need to focus on UI, sound and everything flowing together nicely. This is a little challenging because the devs aren't used to making sound effects but pray that it will all come together.

Gameplay changes

Throughout the process we notices that the camera felt off. Everything was hard to read. The camera was zoomed in a lot to bring in more attention to detail. This came alongside a background change and some speed changes to acommodate the new camera distance.

Art

Textures

It had come to our attention, that the bird assets were hard to tell apart, due to their similar down toned gray and brown textures. Initially that decision was made keeping in mind the overlapping theme of the birds being robot ammonition, and keeping them gray was a technique to make the player character stand out more. However, this made the birds confusing, so we decided to give them a bolder, more recognisable color pallette. Namingly, the parrot and hummingbird assets got a color - makeover.

And with that, the correct bazooka textures have been applied, and hsow up whenever the respective bird type has been picked up:

Almost all of the icebergs have been textured aswell:

HUD/UI

The design of the HUD elements (namely the balloon status) has been scrapped, being replaced with additional indication of each player's pickup status. Small icons show up if the player has selected, for example, the parrot or hummingbird. Alltough, this is not yet functional.

The start screen has also been made:

Tough it still needs adjustments, a lot of time for the artists was spent on grasping how blueprint widgets work and learning how to properly use .targa files to our advantage.

Shader

Animated water shader has been created. It have even without the game being played due to panner node in the shader graph.

RFX

Two Real time effects have been created. The first one is a very simple explosion effect, which was created with the use of sprite sheet. The other one is a fire effect that is going to be used as a engine flame for the bird pickups

Environmnet

Most of the environment in the main level has been filled up with the assets.