What’s new ?
This week, along with eating a lot of turkey, we focused on making gameplay more engaging by altering player gameplay, making aesthetic changes, and building new levels.
Gameplay Changes
- Created new stages with moving and destructible obstacles
- Increased the “bomb drop” time frame
- Increased the speed that players can move their reticle around the stage
- Made the non-deathmatch rounds go by faster
- Tutorial is now skippable
- Screen now shakes when the bombs explode
Aesthetic / UI changes
- Changed the final deathmatch health bar to hearts
- Removed the “OK” button from the stage selection screen
- Changed the color of explosions to match the color of the players
- Changed the color of the “nukes” to be orange so they are not confused with items
Bugs We Ran Into:
- Scenes loading out of order
- Players unable to select stage upon start of second game loop
Why?
The feedback we received from players told us that the funnest part of our game was the final deathmatch. Given that we had three long rounds that made up the bulk of our game leading up to this deathmatch, we wanted to add some spice to the rounds. We did this by making some new stages that have moving and destructible obstacles and adding some juice to the bombs explosions like color and screen shake. Additionally, we wanted to speed up the rounds. We increased rate rate at which players gained points, allowed players to move their bomb reticles faster, and sped up the time in the transition scenes. Some other feedback told us that players were still confused about the final deathmatch round and when the round was ending, so we changes the health bar to hearts, and made it clear when a round was close to ending. Lastly, we had to fix some bugs that were preventing multiple full gameplay loops.
What’s coming?
In the coming weeks, we are going to be adding a lot of extra juice and spice to our game. We feel we finally have a mature structure. Now we can focus on fleshing out the stages, adding power ups, and adding more juice.
