Week09-Production Sprint 2

Production phase - week 3 (End of Sprint)

Programming

Stun Barrels

While the game already has a lot of hazards, some more dangerous than others, implementing barrels  rolling around the deck that will stun you/slow you down can actually bring a different way of playing. Not only can you get hit by these barrels, but you can also shoot them into your enemies. For example if you see a barrel coming towards you, you can shoot it and try to make it hit another player so that the slow effect affects him and not you. 

Kraken Slam

This was a feature that especially for us, the programmers, we imagined would be a challenge and didn't think we would have enough time to get it into the game. We were right on thinking it would be a challenging feature to implement, especially due to the fact that the timing of the animations needed to be perfect with the impact of  the kraken on the ship. As it can be seen in the gif, this week didn't give us all the timing to perfect this  due to  certain problems we encountered with the animation. But by polish phase we expect this to be the most fun and shocking feature in the game.

Character Selection Startscreen

As any game that's ever been made, the need for a startscreen was evident and we had to get it in as soon as possible. We wasted a lot of time on this by starting of wrong. We tried getting input from a playercontroller without using a pawn as indicator which clearly is a wrong approach. While the selection system of the characters works perfectly now, there's still a bug to be fixed where the startscreen level won't detect player input only from player 1. This is strange since after the main level is loaded, the input is back to normal and everyone can control their respective characters.

Timer

Finally, a small addition but something that will go a long way in the end, is the timer for our game. Right now, everything that happens around the ship makes the game seem incredibly chaotic, hard to know what is happening and when, so making a timer is what will allow us to change this. By enabling/disabling features given certain times, we can ensure that the balance of the game won't be too hard to play or too easy. For example, at minute 2, we want the barrels to start spawning, before that players can only shoot each other off the ship and get powerups. This however is just an example of what we could do now that we have a timer.

Art

A new raft for the end-screen  has been created - It will be used for the winner to escape from the pirate ship!

& Wooden hearts attached to ropes for life-stacks indication. 

A rough idea how the end-screen would look like!

We also added some islands to the background to make give a better atmosphere!

Kraken

We rigged the kraken tentacle and created an animation for it where it slams itself on the ship, we've had quite a few struggles with this nasty ol' Kraken so far but by the end of the road it'll be smooth sailing.

RFX

Lastly we also created another particle effect for the power shot ability.