After over 3 weeks of no updates we're back with another devlog! We've missed you guys and are excited to announce some of the stuff we have been working on so far, let's start with some art developments first!

Map Improvements

We have improved the look of the map substantially compared to our previous devlog post. Feast your eyes on these glorious new map pictures. We have added a bunch of assets throughout the map like rocks, planks, bushes and trees and also adjusted the lighting to fit the spring season and vibe we're going for.

Sounds

The game finally has some sound effects! No longer will you play in complete silence with only your innermost thoughts to accompany you. Say hello to background music playing on the main menu as well as during gameplay. Speaking of gameplay, we have a whole bunch of sound effects that will play throughout the game based on actions you perform in the match. Think of things like sticks breaking, an item delivery sound effect, ambient tar bubbling sound effect when close to a tar pit and many more!

Visual Effects

The artists have also worked greatly on creating some cool visual effects for different things in the game. Here are just some of them:

       

Programming & Gameplay

We focused on building and developing the backbone of the gameplay loop with the goal of being enjoyable yet replayable. We decided through player testing and some discussion  that the loop would be focused on players preventing the opposing team from successfully navigating to the fire through utilization of the environment, rather than PVP conflict.

To make this route possible, we introduced droppable obstacles, which we believe will add a new layer of strategy . While we are still deciding their impact on gameplay. We also started making the tar pool. You can now pick up and throw tar on the ground to slow your opponent down or just add tar to your own fire. The picked up and thrown tar models are placeholders at this moment.

Along with these gameplay improvements, we've also paid attention to improving the backend. This will provide a good foundation to build upon for future features and help with a general smoother operation. Some of these improvements are:

- Winning conditions are now also completely added (but the usable items still need balancing)

- The camera has become a lot more dynamic

There is now also a very primitive post game menu that shows why the game ended and who lost. Here you can ready up to play again. While making this menu we lost a lot of time on making inputs work after opting to replay and being brought back into the game. After multiple hours of figuring out why this wasn't working it turned out that there was an event system (that our programmers completely missed) in the game scene that was causing all of this. That was a big waste of time... 

Characters

Grot has become a very handsome young man over these past few weeks, his model has been improved and optimized to work with the final version of the game! Visually you won't notice a very big change (unless you're a very observant reader) so don't worry about him losing his low-poly charm!

It also pains us to announce that due to budget cuts (lack of time) we will only have two playable characters. Grot will be able to enjoy the company of at least one of his friends... but can you guess who it is?

This update is long overdue as we all know, spring break only allowed us to do so much as most of us had some pretty important deadlines to tend to. This will however not be the case from now on! We will return to the weekly updates from here on out, so be on the look-out for more news!

With love and fire, the Dev-men.