Good day to you all and welcome to the second week of this production sprint. As we are nearing the end of our production we are getting a more finished look of our game. We have set the mood and switched the lights on to show you, our almost finished level.

Art

We shall start the devlog with showing the updated level, which is all done by our artist team. Xander and Gwynne both worked hard to make sure all models were modelled, textured and got a working prefab with hitbox so it is easily implemented in the game. Last week we discussed that the lay-out of the house could get an upgrade, so Gwynne took the time make sure the house is logical and functional at the same time. For example, last week there were 2 bedrooms next to each other, but she changed that up by making the kid’s bedroom a bathroom, which is connected via a small hallway as well.

She has also added windows and a front door to the house to make it more believable. Xander has made models for the lights, and Gwynne has placed these so we could light the level. One of our programmers, Jef, has later implemented some test lighting to see how it would look with the dark moody lighting. He added a skybox to the scene, gave the light meshes point lights, added some more of them to the scene and baked all the lights. This really changed the mood of the game, for the better! 

One of the most important bits of feedback from last weeks supervisor meeting is player feedback, or well, the lack thereof. So this week Jef also looked into outline shader, since there were still some issues with it. The outline would only render if you were close enough to the camera. We know what you are thinking “but Jef, isn’t shading a job for the artists?” and you are kind of right. While shaders are their discipline, we believe that in a small team of 5 people you sometimes have to work on different aspects of the game other than your own main discipline to get things done in time.

While working on the outline shader and adding the render features to the URP renderer asset, he accidentally made an occlusion shader. “Happy little accidents”, as that one famous painter on TV would always say. 

Our third and final artist, Sina, has worked on creating the HUD icons that will be shown during the game. While these have not yet been implemented, we can provide a sneak peek of what they will look like. One of the HUD elements that has been designed is the icon for the timer. 

Programming

Last week we play tested the current version of our game and found out that the ghosts win 99% of the time as they just have to keep throwing objects at the shrine cleansing the items. So after some more play testing and feedback from our supervisors, we’ve decided to make some changes to our gameplay loop. Our original gameplay loop pitched the ghosts against the exorcist in an attack / defend type of game mode, where the exorcists had to cleanse the items (attack) and the ghosts had to prevent them from achieving that goal (defend). After having sat together with the team, we came up with a king of the hill type game mode. The basic premise is as follows: there are 5 cursed items at the start of the round with only a few minutes on the clock. The exorcists have to cleanse the items as per usual with the twist that ghosts can “re-curse” cleansed items throughout the round. They do this by picking up a cleansed item and starting their cursing ritual, in place instead of via a shrine. Whichever team has the most cleansed (exorcists) or cursed (ghosts) items when the timer runs out, wins!

Jentl is mostly doing this refactor in the gameplay loop, while Jef finished some other important mechanics and did some player feedback improvements. Jef tweaked Mashable UI to only show when the mashing player is in range. After that, Jef went ahead and added the ability for exorcists to destroy moved furniture. When furniture has been moved by a ghost and an exorcist gets in range, the mash event will start. When the exorcist finishes mashing, the furniture will get destroyed and respawn at its spawn point (position it had when loading the level). This was missing in last weeks build and prevented the exorcists from getting back at the ghosts for putting up a blockade. He also reworked PlayerCharacter script to incorporate a twin stick layout. You can switch between single stick and twin stick layout during gameplay via the Input Layout dropdown on the PlayerCharacter script in the editor. The twin stick layout provides improved control over your aim and where you throw objects. This is needed as there will be a mechanic where an object thrown against a player makes them drop the object they are currently holding.

Further more for Jentl, he worked on the main screen. Making sure that you can quit the game, go to a help menu and start the game were the most important features of this task. At first there were some issues with the selection via the UI Event System that deselected buttons when switching panels and your not able to navigate the screen anymore. After some searching and watching some video's he found that we can use the following:

This makes the '_hekpBackBtn' the current selected button after changing the panels, and this fixes our issue. After this he started on the respawning of items. Before this you could throw an object out of the map and it would be gone... forever..., but don't worry your hero has arrived, as Jentl made it possible for the items to respawn at the place they spawned in the beginning when starting the game. Lastly he started on the change of our game loop and trying to implement this by the end of this production sprint.

This was it for this week, hope you are all still with us and we'll see you next week!