UPDATES FROM THE TEAM
LILIAN
This week, I mainly fixed some bugs and tried to implement the desert sand pits animation and colliders. Unfortunately, the map is still very buggy and I haven’t managed to figure it out. As the playtest is coming soon, I will focus on higher priority tasks as the desert map isn’t necessary for a complete preliminary gameplay experience.
ZHI HANG
To generate more flow and polish to the gameplay, I’ve drawn some sprites for the effects (VFX). These effects consist of the hitting impact, attack swings and dust particles.
As always, it’s a good idea to have a look at how other professionals design their VFX and draw inspiration from there. Therefore, I looked up references from various games such as Street Fighter and Granblue Fantasy. While attempting to replicate their design styles, I noticed that there are numerous variants of the “hit” impact. Besides the standard horizontal jabs/punches, many fighting characters can swing their legs diagonally and use special attacks. This set of different moves bring about new ways of varying the look of the attack VFX. For example, a character can perform a forward jab, hence the game designer could draw additional horizontal lines to highlight the forward impact.
This also gave me an idea on referring to mangas to see how manga professionals “draw out” fast and impactful movements. I noticed that for swings, a curved elongated “droplet” and a bubble burst in the middle (presumed to be the point of impact). I followed these references to draw out the hitting effects for our characters.
As for the dust effects, I noticed that most fighting games use computer graphics to generate them. Hence I referred to dust vectors to hand-draw ours so that our art style remains consistent.
AIK PENG
To improve the feel of the game, I created VFX sprites for Ring-Out (falling off the platforms), on-hit, jumping and landing particles. I also tried creating a wind VFX for the crane’s heavy attack, but I was unable to create something satisfactory. Would need to try again next week.
I also started designing the Pangolin. With the silhouette done, I can start drawing out its moves.
ROBIN
Finally managed to separate the cactusFSM into a separate entity, with its own LightAtk and HeavyAtk states. This allows us to easily extend and add in more characters in the future, by just implementing their respective attack states. The other states are shared by all characters, and specific properties and values can be tweaked and edited by the inspector directly.
YU CHUN
Improved knockback The original knockback was very abrupt as there was no horizontal velocity when the player was falling down back to the ground. I added some horizontal velocity to the player. Although I realised another bug where the knockback does not seem very responsive, which Gabriel fixed in his PR this week.
GABRIEL
This week: more bug fixes!
There are no more issues when a room is set up! We just had to split the create and join buttons. This also helps with integrating Chuyue’s new main menu in the future. There’s also a fight banner at the start of the stage now! Here’s a video showing the above two changes!
Another thing that was fixed was the attack hitboxes. Now they should properly knockback the player instead of juggling them.
Finally, there is now a proper procedure for building the game on Mac and Windows, so anyone should be able to play the game!