Intro

Hello ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking, or should I say this is the WYDT team speaking. We are glad to announce that this was the final week of feature implementation, this means that we can finally move on to polishing.

“Last week”, we got the opportunity to let our game be playtested by our classmates, and boy were their comments ever so helpful. We got loads of player feedback from it, this really helped us along when it came to the player friendliness of our game.

Camera

Surprisingly enough the camera was one of the main issues on this query. Looking back on it this was really a stupid mistake. All camera programmer veterans will probably chuckle when reading this bit, the camera had no lerp to go from point A to point B, which made it extremely snappy, luckily for us this was an easy fix.

Hud

To be honest, this was something we saw coming. The hud didn’t do a good job showing what the player should be doing right now, this was mainly a size issue. The elements were simply too small to be viewed by the user, again easy fix scale the buttons and make them more apparent by giving them some uniqueness. We also make the texts on them bigger.

Pause menu

Feature alert: We added in a swanky a** looking pause menu to introduce a new meta to our game, the meta being that the players can now pause the game when they feel like they need to pause them game, in addition to pausing the pause menu provides a button which allows the users to quit the game, again this enables them to quit the game if their hearts so desire.

Task System

You guessed it, this was another thing that came up in the feedback. The players didn’t always know what they had to do. So the artists made a halo material, to be used on the currently interesting interactables. When the material was made, the programmers jumped to action to implement this new shiny (“literally”) feature.

Variable amount of players support

This was a huge one on the list, we now added support for 1-4 players, meaning that the players can join on the main menu, the game automatically recognizes this and pumps out less taks, draws less ui elements, shows less score counters and so on. This doesn’t seem like a big deal but it was, we had to alter some classes to fit this new behaviour, but we are glad we did it.

Sounds

Another sound update, since our sound designer bailed on us :S, we had to come up with some sounds ourselves and seeing neither of us knew how to produce sounds we jumped straight to the internet and got round to downloading some royalty free sounds, fortunately the fit our game very well and the even started to grow on us. We can’t officially call these sounds the WYDT sounds but they sure feel like it. We added some extra ambient sounds, collision sounds and ambient music for both the main menu and the level.

Supervisor

Up until recent (now), our supervisor was just a dump AI that strut about the level and occasionally dropped/accepted an item or two, now however he has a full decision making tree that allows him to detect “naughty” behaviour making him a valuable asset to our game. The artists made particles/animations to express this, the particles were already featured in a previous blog post so be sure to check that out :D.

Animations

Now that we actually can win the game, we have to make sure that we show them real good who the employee of the month is! Why not with a victory animation? And to have some more fun, your friends have their defeat animation to enjoy :D.

Particles

The last new particles were made. The calling- , punch- and of course confetti particle. The first 2 were made to make the players actions more clear and the confetti to use in the victory screen.

Props

We have some new props in our level, like the exit sign, the lavalamp, the fridge, a nice classy carpet and the very first phone. None of these are used for a task, they’re just for decorating the level but you can pick them still up.

Outro

That was it for this week folks, I hope you had a great time reading this. The next weeks will be extremely busy for us seeing that finals are coming up. We will be spending the next two weeks on extreme polishing. See you next week, maybe crack open a cold one with the boys or girls (I’m not judging).

WYDT Team !