Howdy!

Today we bring our 1.0 version to the tables. Our development cycle has finished, and so we go into polishing our shinies. A lot has changed and improved since the last version, which was 0.7. Our aim was to get the game back on its tracks, fixing controller issues a task of huge importance. The problem we had was that we were using Unity's Input Manager, which most people find pretty broken. We have upgraded to XInputDotNet to register our input from. This extension communicates to windows, asking for whichever controller is number one, or two, or three or four, rather than having Unity registering the controllers manually, which causes problems when the controllers are already plugged in, and the game gets launched. We also had our temporary UI replaced with something a lot more fancy. Something that looks nice, and shows which part belongs to what player. The players also received their long deserved upgrade, 1 model and color for each player. Some annoying bugs that have been lurking the game for a while now, have also finally been fixed.

Our new fancy characters!

After many weeks of waiting, the character models are finally finished! Now players can distinguish themselves from each other, rather than getting the feeling someone else is controlling their characters.

Each player has a backpack with a color that represents which player it is. They also make sure the players know which part of the UI was meant for them.

Player Hitboxes

Flying into another player didn't feel "right" simply because the players had 1 giant collider covering them. This was needed for detecting the punches, but made the collision feel weird. These hitboxes have been updated, to cover the entire bodyparts of the players. This makes for smooth collision between the players. The hitbox for detecting punches is still present, but is now a trigger making sure you can't collide with it.

New fancy UI!

Our initial idea, was to show the lives and knockback values on the visual 3D backpacks themselves. Unfortunately the backpacks are too small to achieve this, scaling them up would mean scaling up the players, which would mean scaling up the playing field or there wouldn't be much space to play on, which would mean the players would just get smaller again, you get the point. Instead, we rendered out the backpacks to an image, and used those as our UI, strategically placed to ensure it's visible, while at the same time it doesn't block the action.

Backpacks have been placed away from the corners of the screen, since usually when someone gets punched out of the screen, it's in the general direction of a corner. There is also a decent space in between the backpacks, and they don't take too much space, making sure you can see all the action.

Our UI is animated!

Our fancy UI also comes with a fancy animation! When the damage/knockback counter changes it plays a shiny grow and shrink animation, making the player aware of what is happening to him. The animation gets reset everytime the counter is changed, meaning the more he gets hit in a short time, the more the UI will react.

Lives do count!

Our UI now comes with Lives as well, so you know how many chances you still have to try and punch your friends out of the screen. Each player gets 3 lives, after these are gone, the player will no longer respawn. Whochever player remains last wins the game!

As you can see, when the player dies, he loses a life from his lives bar. Unfortunately there is no End Screen in the game yet, meaning you will have to restart the game when a player has won, but we considered this to be a job for our polishing stage.

Animations updated

Our punch didn't feel right, and thus we sped it up to be spamable. Our grab animation didn't exaclty do what it was supposed to do, so this is now finally updated. We will still continue to polish our animations further, but for now have fun punching each other in the face, and throwing each other out of the screen!

Punching:

Grabbing:

Loading and Start Screen

We didn't have any way of showing the controls to the player yet. We were planning on adding a "How To Play" section in the menu's. But during playtest sessions our feedback pointed towards it being really amazing that they can just play. The ability to start the game and play without having to go through a dozen menu's, was something the players liked. The ability to plug in a controller and join the current game at any moment, felt great. So where can we show the controls? Why in a loading screen off course! When you open the game, a loading screen will pop up, showing the controls for the game. After the game is loaded, it gives you the time to continue reading the controls, untill you decide to press the START button on your controller. This wil fade out the screen with the controls, and the game will start. Other players pressing start from this point, will spawn in after pressing START. Allowing our game to still feel "Plug And Play", while still having a way to show the player the controls.

Other changes/changelist

Along with the 1.0 changes, there are some other minor changes/fixes that are always worth mentioning, so here is a list of the other things that have been done since the last version.

1. Fixed some controls being incorrect
2. Updated materials on certain objects
3. Updated meshes on certain objects
4. Fixed glow not showing anymore for 2/3 of the pickups
5. Fixed bug where player somehow lost a live while respawning
6. Reduced the amount of triangles on 1 of the pickups' meshes
7. Bird particles are now more random
8. Fixed some of the hitboxes on certain objects
9. Bull obstacle finaly recieved its mesh
10. Updated some of the spawners and made some objects less rare
11. Beerkeg object finally recieved a material
12. Grabbing now works as intended

The game's unfortunate casualties

As I have mentioned last week, we had some communication issues within our team. Due to this there is a bunch of content that will sadly never see the light of day again. We have discussed this issue and hopefully it won't happen again, but I'm afraid what has been done has been done, and we most likely can't bring that content back.

Sound

You might be wondering why there is no sound in our 1.0 version, this is simply because we have always planned to implement the sound during our polishing days, which are now. So you can expect to hear the game sing in its full glory by next week!

Plans for next week

For next week, we will add in the audio for the game, perhaps a cool catchy song, I mean hopefully we get that last one. We will also continue to fix bugs and polish our existing features. Oh and add in an "End Game" off course.