UPDATES FROM THE TEAM
LILIAN
I returned to working on the desert as the group decided that it was worthwhile to implement the second map. The sandpit colliders took longer to implement than expected, and I only managed to configure one of them. The other pit has a different animation which may require a totally different approach, which I will look into another time.
ZHI HANG
With the looming play-testing session this week, we had to re-focus on the scope of our game. The top priority is to re-create that polished “feel” that all fighting games have.
Hence, after some play-testing on our end, we noticed that the cactus’ punching hitboxes are too small. We actually had to get really close to the opponent to register a hit. However, rather than re-drawing the arms of the Cactus to be larger, we will observe the testers’ reactions during the play-test to see if there is really a need to enlarge the arms. Other than re-drawing the arms, we could also consider making the camera zoom closer to the Cactus, or even draw additional frames to telegraph its attacks.
It turns out the hitboxes are alright. The playtesters were more bothered with the missing link between the knockback effect and the amount of damage sustained and connectivity issues. They did mention that the attacks lack impact - this is due to the lack of effects VFX in our current build. We will definitely implement them by the next playtesting since Aik Peng and I have already drawn some of them. Moreover, telegraphing the Cactus' movements would be a stretch goal if time permits (hopefully). I am more concerned about when we could confirm the final design for our Cactus character since it took me more than a day to just add the gloves and standardise the colour of the Cactus. I will check with the team to finalise its design to reduce some 'art debt'.
AIK PENG
This week, I finished up components of the Crane that were missing like the headshot and the wind projectiles, as well as fixing some of the animations (forgot to export/import some of the animations).
Speaking of headshot, it was about time I created a more complete version of the crane beyond just outlines. When designing the character, I wanted to incorporate the features of the red-crowned crane (the red ‘crown’ and the black neck/face) as clothing. Obviously, the red-crowned crane’s gotta have her red crown! However, drawing a crown isn’t really the easiest task… I looked at the crowns worn by Japanese princesses, and while I didn’t manage to draw out an exceptional crown, I think it worked. I then tried thinking of what could work as a replacement for the black neck, and got the idea of a scarf, though it does make the crane look like a ninja. Maybe the red-crowned cranes are ninjas in this world? I really like the references to Japan with the crane, it seems like everything is coming together!
This is just a concept that I haven’t really got the approval of my teammates, so this could definitely change. :”)
ROBIN
This week was hectic since there was going to be peer testing midway this week. This means we had to clean up our game and make it more presentable for the upcoming playtesting. I did some minor changes to the menus of the game such as lowering the total characters that we can select from 10 to 4. This will temper the expectations of the players since our game development plan has scope for only 4 characters.
Also, finally, I put the crane together, with the new and refactored state machine. The crane’s movesets are now put together and work mostly fine. There is an issue with projectiles in that we never actually set up hitboxes on the projectiles so it wouldn’t hit anything. After doing that, I also realised that the projectiles work weirdly when playing online multiplayer.
YU CHUN
It is Week 8 peer testing! As we might have accidentally focused too much on the player movement and controls, our GUI was very basic and looks unappealing at all. I implemented the GUI. I added player damage and lives left as well as a proper game over screen. As it was very rushed, we did not have time to test the game before we shipped it. Hopefully in the next iteration, we can properly test the game and fix all the basic bugs.
GABRIEL
Super worried this week. After observing how difficult it was to create the characters, I decided to make major changes to our character state machine.
Thankfully the changes were successful, and now our characters (Cactus and Crane) finally play the correct animations! Attacks now deal damage and have different knockback velocities too!
This unblocks a lot of our development:
Artists can now properly test their animations
Programmers can now easily set up new characters (hello pangolin!)
Designers can finally start doing game balancing
As a bonus, the changes surprisingly also fixed character dashing.
Here’s how our Cactus moveset looks like now!