Hello comrades, another update here :D. This has been the first week of the polish sprint, meaning that this was the second to last week of development. This weeks focus was primarily on the UX of our game, this meant improvements of all sorts.

Camera

On major improvement that was a long time coming was the camera, fixing the camera was a hard task since we had no previous experience on keeping very unpredictable players on screen. Though we had to do some digging we devised a way that allows all players to do their own thing, we achieved this by assigning so called players of interest those players get an extra bias in the average camera location, this solution probably isn’t the best out there but it seems to get the job done thus far.

Points for tasks that don’t exist

Although this is quite funny, we all had to agree that this is more bug than feature. So patching this was a major priority, now you rightfully get points instead of cheating your way out of it :D. I hope that our mailbox doesn’t get spammed for removing this “feature” (bug), but I don’t think it will.

Better outlines

It is no secret that we like our colour palettes, the outline colour was no exception we used to do this in the WYDT colour (a shade of pastel red). This however was not to obvious for the eye, so we changed this to a bright green. Why green I hear you ask, well since our artists made the choice of not including green in the colour scheme of our game, this obviously plays out very nicely since we can now use this colour as a stark contrast between the level and what’s important.

Improvements on movement

Another thing that was somewhat important was the speed at which characters rotate, this was pointed out to us by our peers who thought that this felt rather sluggish. We are not going to lie about it, but this is a very easy fix, but it made the user feel like he’s really in charge of his rotations. This is obviously an outcome that we like.

Points for sabotaging

This feature was supposed to be in the game already, and people might say that we are crazy for adding this in the polish stage, but overall this is a very small addition/effort to implement/perfect this so we did it anyway :D. This made it more of a strategy to sabotage/repair certain items, beforehand this was just a fun activity to do, now we also reward the players for their naughty/prime behaviour.

Sounds

Some sounds were quite simply a bit to loud, so a few had to be brought down in volume. The prime examples of this were the collision sounds and the BGM.

Next to brining sounds down in volume we also added three additional sounds, one for the footsteps and one for task completion/initialization respectively. This also improves UX, since they notify the player.

The marks of the outsider

We added some marks in the level, we added a scorch mark for when fire gets extinguished and a coffee stain for when a coffee can gets spilled.

Hud/Menu fixes

We made the menus simpler to use in the sense of the button placement, we added buttons to the main menu for easy replay/tutorial access. Talking about tutorial access we also added a tutorial button on the pause menu, for when the game should appear confusing (would only happen if your IQ is lower than 60 jk.)

Particles

This is another example of something rather small, but this improves the UX a bunch. We simply scaled the coffee brewing particle, and made the fire particles more apparent. We also fixed our confetti particle so it was more optimized and finished for the game.

Props

The office has gotten a lot fresher with the new plants we added. It also got upgraded with some staplers and a push-able whiteboard, and to spice up the boring brown floor, there are now red carpets in front of each door.

Animations

Just as the title suggests, no strings attached we added an animation for when the players picks/drops things, we had our artists design that animation, they also had to provide one for when the player is in a walking state. There now also is an idle with pickup animation.

Outro

That was it for this blogpost, thank you for reading and keep an eye out for us next week!

WYDT Team!