This week, we added many quality of life features as well as some changes to the core mechanic of our game. We revised our start menu to include separate options for the game itself and the tutorial. The tutorial has also been revamped to be more intuitive to users and to give each player a solid understanding by forcing each player to run through it by themselves.
The end goal of our game has changed from gathering a certain number of apples to a time-based system. We have added a sun that sets, which indicates the end of the game. The team with the highest number of apples at the end of this will win. For this, we removed our previous implementation of a progress bar indicating apples and replaced it with a pile of apples that get added to as the players harvest more.
We added small UI fixes to the trees to indicate the number of apples the tree will give when harvested. We also added an area of effect around each tree so that trees can't be placed directly next to an existing one. This was to help with conflicting and overlapping trees. We also added a small trail effect for players when they dash, giving them a more visual cue of when they are dashing.
We also balanced the gameplay a bit more by making bigger trees harder to destroy. We also had issues where players were accidentally chopping down their own trees, so we disabled this. We also changed the map back to a 2-sided arena from our previous checkerboard formation.
