UPDATES FROM THE TEAM
LILIAN
This week, I continued working on UI fixes such as adding a splash screen at the start of the game and changing the menu backgrounds. I also reskinned the options menu implemented by Peter.
CHUYUE
I spent the whole week still trying to figure out how to interpolate the characters. The answer was surprisingly simple: photon actually provides example lerp code. Not sure why the classic photon transform view’s lerp doesn't work, but I adapted the example lerp code into a second version of photon transform view and now our jumps look much better :)
ZHI HANG
This week has another round of play testing. I added some additional VFX that could be shared between the Cactus and Crane characters. I mainly drew the sprites for dashing and the knockback smoke, while Aik Peng drew the jumping, hitting and spawning effects.
I noticed that my art style is very “cartoony”. But when I referred to other fighting games, especially Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, most VFX do not have an opaque black outline. While I could have used a consistent art style, I decided to replace the colour of the outline instead. This is to give them a more “secondary” view and reduce the attention drawn to them (main focus should be on the fighters). The most challenging VFX to draw for me was the knockback smoke. In Smash, the smoke trails from the point of impact to the character (that would be flying across the map). Hence my reference was a dynamic (likely) computer-generated effect. What I did was to try to separate the smoke trail and draw a “block” of the smoke, and then extrapolate the block to form a trail. Thanks to Chuyue’s efforts, we were able to successfully replicate the smoke trail (as best as we could)!
I’ve also drawn a simple respawn and landing animation frames for the Cactus.
ROBIN
The main focus for this week was to try and fix some bugs that we spotted from our internal playtesting, as well as some quality of life changes. For example, dashing now will not be affected by gravity, so the characters will dash horizontally in a straight line. Also, to facilitate having a more vertical level layout, the characters can now jump through platforms. Crane feathers now shoot downwards at 60 degrees when using the aerial attack, to make it easier to hit enemies.
YU CHUN
Full-screen toggle switches between full screen and ¼ pixels is now working and users can no longer resize. This would prevent the UI from incorrectly displaying. Sound effects in the menu for all the buttons, there’s a soft on hover sound, success and failure sound and many other sounds which will make our game more interactable and fun to use. I’ve also added sound effects for the player characters, giving them sounds for their attacks and running states. The option is now correctly saved every time users make an action.
GABRIEL
I’ve finally implemented hitstop on the characters!
I’ve never really noticed hitstop in games until it was brought up during our alpha build playtest. If you have time, I recommend checking out this video to learn about hitstop, and how it adds drama and intensity into fighting games:
In order to implement hitstop, I had to modify how our state machines are networked so that the hitstop can be synced. Hopefully there are no networking bugs! Hitstop also helped to uncover (and fix) issues with our hitbox detection system. They were pretty silly bugs:
Damaged players can become forever invulnerable
The second punch of the Cactus didn’t deal damage
Hitboxes sometimes dealt double damage
Hitboxes were hitting the terrain and the background