Hey cavemen!

This will be our last devlog before the release of our game! We're very excited for the upcoming release but you will still have to wait one short week for this. In the meantime, we have some interesting new things to show you all, let's see what our team improved on this week!

During this polish phase no major changes are going to be made to the game anymore. Most of the things we've been doing the past week have been (as the name suggests) polishing up what we already had. This means balancing gameplay, refining visuals and overall improvements to the way the game is played. 

Environment

Our environment artist Cem has made a cool little animation for when trees are pushed over, take a look!

This makes the action of dropping a tree look significantly better and also more clear, before it was barely noticeable when you pushed over a tree. You might have also seen the tiny clouds and sticks flying away when the tree hits the ground. This was done by our main VFX artist Trygve.

Speaking of VFX, the fire VFX has been updated and refined to have way more of a presence in the map. We often got feedback during playtests that the fire was too insignificant and small to notice, especially for something so essential to the gameplay. This is why it was of high priority to fix this as soon as we hit the polish phase.

The border of the map has also seen a revision. The feedback we received is that it looked too "walkable" as if you could go on top of it, since it was mostly comprised of bushes. To remedy this, Cem replaced the bushes with tree meshes and this really improved the look of the map border! On top of that, a new adjustment was made to the main shader to allow foliage to sway! So now our environment is starting to become alive more and no longer feels so static.

Animations

We have added quite a few new animations throughout the game, from a specific animation when walking in tar, to an animation that plays when you ready up in the pre game lobby. Here's some of them:

Menus and UI

Changes have also been made in the main menu, pre/post game lobby and tutorial section of the game. These things include fixing the volume bar slider to properly follow the shape of the volume bar, a brand new tutorial picture that will be added to the previous 3 we already had, new music specifically for the post game lobby, etc. Of course we can't really show the sound effects here, but instead you can take a look at the visuals we changed :)

Alongside the menus another improvement comes in the form of a new look for the in-game UI! We got a lot of feedback concerning the size of the sprites and especially the look of the scoreboard so we opted to scale down the size of the UI and re-design the scoreboard to only hold essential information now, how do we feel about this change?

Controller

We added controller vibrations. When a player connects their controller, it vibrates a few times based on their player number, for example, Player 1 gets one pulse, Player 2 gets two, and so on. It's a small detail, but it helps players quickly know which character they're controlling.