This week, we have been focusing on balancing the game mechanics, squashing bugs in the game, and adding some small mechanics to make the game feel more complete. First things first, balancing. The biggest thing that required balancing was a sound design, to fix this we changed the volume levels of various sfx and then we additionally added RNG triggers to some sfx that were prone to happen very often to prevent them from being spammed. Then, of course we had to go through and squash the bugs that arise whenever anything is tweaked or moved or nudged at all. Our initial bug fixes came through our enemy AI scripts to ensure that they are tracking the players properly and that they understand their movement conditions better to avoid becoming deadlocked in changing their direction. Then, we had to do some bug fixing in our player controller scripts as they inherit from the same script that the fixes to enemy came from which in turn caused issues with player sprites rotating upon death, so that needed to be stomped out. And lastly, we made a lot of utilities bug fixes such as keys returning to their spawn when the player holding them dies to prevent softlocking and fixing the functionality of the triggered door to work properly with player elements to prevent players from interacting with each other in the element training rooms. Lastly (again), we added a few new tricks to make the game that last bit more juicy. The first of these being a looping video in character select to display how each of their abilities work. Then we added the last two elemental channel abilities so that everyone can now channel with one another. We also added some screen shaking during scripted events and more haptic feedback when connecting a hit against an enemy with a vibration and different sfx than a missed attack.
The reasoning behind our focus on more polish than innovation this week is because we are in the endgame and this will likely be the final build of our game that we will be uploading. Since this is the endgame, we decided that it would be prudent to focus on making the game feel as complete as possible by fixing as many reasonable things as we could and scrapping anything that cant be fixed by our deadline.
Now I know some of you are wondering where this project is heading after this week and that is something we are unsure of at this moment. For now it is a proof of concept for our team, a technical demo of sorts. We may come back to this project after our game design course has ended and see if we can push our technical demo into a full fledged game, but of course time will tell. Nevertheless, we appreciate all of the support we have gotten over the course of our development cycle and we hope that you stayed tuned for any future projects that we may have in store.
From Halt Studios we hope that you all keep on keeping on
