One Last Devlog? – April 10th

We're at the final stages now, getting ready for the Level Up showcase, trying to keep our current post-beta path of polishing and ironing out issues. The game is definitely feature-complete now. There are more avenues we could go down, like 2v2 or a timed mode, but recently we're aiming to have as "complete" a package as we can with what we currently have. 

The UI is all new, heavily refined since the beta. We recognized that people were getting confused by the different bars so we tried to cut things down to bare necessities, base elements! We relocated the health bar to the circle around the player character where the stamina gauge used to be – a little more visually prominent and easier to see because it's against a solid background. We then disposed of the stamina gauage altogether, and significantly lowered the cooldown on dashes, so players can pretty much dash around to their heart's content. We hope this also encourages players to use that button more, since the cooldown, sort of unintuitive as it was, probably was confusing people and leading to them not trying again after hitting the button and having nothing happen a couple times.

A sample of the corner-locked player UI in-game:

Now it's compact. No bar extending into the side.

We also heavily changed the way secondary weapons work; there's no customization screen anymore, and secondaries are like power-ups you pick up on the field, with limited ammunition! They're also much more powerful now to compensate for this increased rarity of use. I like the freeze shot a lot now, personally, since it's the only way to really get in full control of the other player's movement. The feeling of getting someone stuck and then finding an angle to pummel them from is very satisfying. I think this change was extremely positive. We kept the existing powerups in too and people go for them more now! Amazing!

Implicit in removing the customization screen is removal of colour customization. Now every player number just has a colour assigned. Simpler, fewer frills...it wasn't really core to the point of our game, anyway. 

We were suggested Cinemachine for the dynamic camera system earlier in the term – we were considering scrapping camera movement totally at some point, but when we saw one of our group member's work with Cinemachine that was out of the question! I think it looks great now. It's what we've been trying to achieve all this time. May seem like a simple thing, but just getting fluid camera movement is very tough and very important to making the game pleasant to play!

We now have a new menu splash screen too, which I think looks really nice. 

Finally, going into Level Up we have a bunch of minor improvements on the docket. In the last 48 hours or so we revamped death animations to make them a little more exciting. Now the robots explode on impact and their parts fly everywhere! It looks hilarious and I think really adds something to the moment to moment chaos of a match.

This might be our last dev log. I'm not sure how much to put here, or how wide to take the scope, but in total the work process on this game has been pretty solid. We've been able to divide work pretty effectively, people have been responsive and efficient...I'm encouraged by the quality of everyone's work every time I see something new pushed to the repository.

See you at Level Up!