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What we've done this week: 

• Hazard Spawn System
• Pinball bumppad hazard
• Updated the HUD
• Character Selection
• UI
• Updated Environment
• More sound effects (play the game to hear!!)
• More VFX (unique effect per collision, meteor trail, speedboost trail, bump pad effect)
• Controller rumble for different interactions (character selection, respawning, being launched, ...; play the game to feel!!)
• Some player feedback (flickering the walls before they open, flickering the shield before it wears off)

Environment

Pinball Bumppad

The pinball bumppad has been finished, and the effects for it have been connected.  The pinball bumppad launches the player in a semi-random direction upon hitting it.

VFX

Here are some of the new VFX in the game, other ones that are not included here but that were added are: the new control loss VFX, and the different collision effects.

Updated HUD

The HUD has been updated with the correct art elements, to ensure it scales properly on all devices. There also are icons to display which power-ups a player has, this is a work in progress though. Currently they're just always displayed. Next week they will only show up when a player has a certain power-up!

UI

We now have a working UI, not all art elements are in the UI in our build yet, but all of the screens' art has been created by Zuzanna! Here's what the final result will look like!

Character Selection

The main feedback for our game was, that it's hard to track the player, by adding a character selection screen the player knows what color and cat they will control before starting the game, which makes it much easier to do this. The menu itself is not finished, but this does fix our problem. Same as for the other UI here, the art elements have already been created.

Hazard Spawn System

Instead of only having set hazards in the level, we opted for a spawn system to add more variation. This adds a lot more fun, chaos, and variation to the gameplay. The main issue that we encountered was, we still need some control over this spawning. You don't want too many hazards to spawn at the same time, some hazards are wall-based and others are ground-based, not the whole game should feel the same.

Event Structure

Here's the solution for this problem: an "event" based spawn system. The system is made up of different events, in this event structure we can set different parameters to decide what will spawn, how long it takes, and so on. We also have a distinct first and last event to ensure we can control the beginning and end of the game. Here's an example for the first event structure, and an explanation of what each variable means:

Meaning of the variables

Min and Max duration: this is how long the event takes, a random duration within this interval is selected. Hazard Classes: the hazards that can spawn; these hazards have a variable that'll decide if they can spawn on the ground, wall, or both as well. Weights: this decides how likely it is for a certain hazard to spawn; E.g if hazard 1 has a weight of 10, and hazard 2 of 5, hazard 1 is 2x more likeley to spawn. Min and Max hazards: the amount of hazards that can spawn during this event, a random amount within this interval is generated. Max Occurance: How many times can this event happen during the game, this allows for certain unique events to only happen once. Weight: similar as the hazard weights, this will decide how likely an event is to happen; everytime an event happens this weight is also halved to make sure it isn't as likely to get the same event multiple times in a row.

Hazard Spawning

Spawning is done using spawn boxes that are placed in the level, there's wall and ground spawn boxes. When a hazard spawns, a random point in this box is chosen, with a random rotation added as a spawn parameter for ground hazards

System In Action

All of the above logic, allows for a heavily customizable hazard spawn system, here's some gameplay examples we've setup!
A Pinball Event, which spawns mostly pinball bump pad hazards

A relax, buffer event, to introduce some more slow-paced gameplay between the chaotic event

Ice event

End game event, let the chaos emerge!

Thank you for reading, and see you next time!