Week 5: Introducing hazards + environment visuals

Another week of production has passed! We have made a lot of progress with our game mechanics and visuals of the game. Here's a sneak peek before we get into discussing everything we've been working on. As you can see we've added a background, a floor texture, there's now a lighting setup and there are multiple hazards in the game! 

Cool art stuff

Cats

Zuzanna worked on the concept for our characters in the bumper cars, which are of course cute cats.

Once the concept was done, Tika started modeling the first character. For now, we will stick with a single character for all players, but next production sprint we'd like the other options & a character selection screen.

Other models

Other models were also made by the art team, which aren't necessarily in the game yet but will be soon.

Effects

Collisions

Bart started working on some effects for our game. Here's the first version for an effect that would be used when 2 cars collide with each other.

Some other Effects that were added to our game:

The indicator that the button is active

A fill up shader that indicates the amount of boosting a bumper car has:

Boost cooldown

We've also managed to display the boost cooldown visually. This is very useful player feedback, now you don't have to keep spamming the boost button and just guess when you or your enemy is able to boost.

A bunch of added mechanics

Our primary focus during the first production sprint is to (of course) add all of the core mechanics to the game so this week we've mostly added those. Here's a quick rundown of all the added mechanics.

Score system

A first version of the score system has been finished, at the moment it is not displayed in the HUD yet but we can already explain & show how it works as all of the logic has been finished!

In this example, a player hits another player which causes a chain reaction. The first player (blue) gains a lot of base score because of this.

Our score system works using a base score & a multiplier. The base score is gained by hitting other players, then this score is multiplied by the multiplier to get the final gained score. Multipliers are gained by pushing opponents into hazards or off the map

Now for the results of this interaction, we'll have to look in the editor since the score is not being displayed yet, I've made this easy to check though by both outputting in the console & allowing people to inspect the score component in the editor.

For the blue player: 

For the other players (this is the same for all 3 players in this case; BP_BumperCar0 got cut off but this is the blue player): 

The score flow

To make sure we don't miss any details & to document the score logic properly, I've made a flow chart in our design document for all score-related things.

Here's the one for player-player interactions (collisions), which is the primary way of gaining base score: 

One of the ways to gain a multiplier is by pushing players off the map, the losing player loses score for this interaction.

The launchpad is back! (but better)

The launchpad is now back in the game, but to make it more interesting it is now a triangular shape, allowing players to be launched in different directions. The force still scales based on impact allowing you to launch players across the map with ease! Placing these strategically can enhance the gameplay a lot.

The return of the ice floor

You may have noticed there are weird cubes on the map, these will be ice cubes that make the floor slippery ice upon impact. Stay tuned to see what the artists do with it! We can already show it in action though. It's a great way for players to gain extra score and bring extra chaos to the gameplay.

Speed booster

We've added the speed booster back, it now gives you a speed boost no matter what direction you go in. This does mean we'll have to come up with a different model to represent the boost. If you have any ideas let us know! 

Next week

Next week is the final week of the first production sprint. We will try to finish all tasks that are still planned. Here's a quick summary of the tasks we have on the board: 

• Meteor event
• Texturing the car
• Texturing the character (cat)
• Score counter in the HUD
• Finishing up the collisions & wall bounce mechanics
• Adding the spike hazard
• Texture for the ice floor & ice cube
• A random direction version of the launchpad

More info will be given for each of these next week when they're finished!