Dev Log - Week of November 20th

Hello! This week we began working on polishing up our game to prepare for release on the 27th, and finalized a report of our playtesting data. 

Progress

Programming:

• Trick animations
  • We added additional tricks to our game, with corresponding combos and animations.
• Skybox Changes
  • We made some changes to our skybox, to hide seams in the texture

Art:

• Character Model Changes:
  • We found that the character cloak was obscuring some of animations of the character. We've added a cut in the cloak to better show the foot of the pogo stick.
• UI Work:
  • Added icons for scrolls

Audio:

• Flip Sound Effects
  • Created new flip sound effects, that sound less digital than the original sounds
  • We plan to play these at random pitches to add additional variation

Challenges

1. Incentivizing Tricks, Movements, and Speed:
   • We had a lot of feedback about the timer in our level, during our playtesting sessions. We want to encourage the player to perform tricks, but also move around the level that we've designed. After some brainstorming, our plan is to add multiple objectives, related to collecting items and performing tricks. We will change our timer to count up instead, giving the player the option to take as much time as they would like in our level, while still providing a metric to optimize for more competitive players.

Next Step

Programming:

• Clean up the tutorial level
  • Add grass and additional visuals
  • Change starting camera orientation
  • Add additional sections
• Implement the objective based system
• Clean up UI for our level selection screen
• Final visual changes
  • Update the terrain shader to use a different material for stones, and support masking to hide edges
  • Additional post processing effects/particle effects on tricks
• Work on our trailer

Art:

• Work on the trailer
• Recolour floating platforms to match the terrain colour
• Recolour trees

Audio:

• Work on the trailer

See you next week!