Hi everyone. This week was an improvement to the overall game loop and graphics!

Art

Environment and Assets

Characters and Animation

We’ve finished up the final character drawings. Each one now has a colour assigned to them, which helps a lot with keeping everything organized and visually distinct. It’s been interesting seeing them come together and start to feel like actual characters rather than just sketches.

On top of that, we’ve also completed 3 animations for the character. That includes an idle animation for when they’re standing still, a walk cycle for movement, and a jump animation to bring things to life a bit more.

RFX

Smoke sprites have been drawn but not yet implemented. We have a smoke effect for when the player walks, hits the ground, hits a wall and hits a surface with the grapple hook.

Code

Over the holidays, we made some solid progress and tackled several key areas to polish and improve the gameplay experience:

• Improved Multiplayer Camera
  The camera system has been overhauled for multiplayer. It now smartly tracks the player who's currently in the lead, making it easier to follow the action and making it look less like a autoscroller.

• Grapple Pull Mechanic
  Players can now use the grapple not just for movement but also to pull other players, adding a new layer of strategy and movement possibilities.

• Grapple UI Visualization
  We've added a UI element that shows when the grapple is being used and the total uses it has left, giving clearer feedback and improving the visual clarity of what's happening in the game.

• Rendering Fixes & Level Expansion
  Fixed some component rendering issues that had been hanging around and also expanded the level with more objects to interact with and explore.

• External Playtesting
  We brought in an external players to test the current game flow. Their feedback has already sparked a few improvements and highlighted areas we’ll continue refining. We also tested a lot more of our work before we completed them to prevent issues here and there

Audio

We decided on a passive mix per player in our scene, which works beautifully with Unity, but noticed an annoying issue. Phasing. Phasing happens when multiples of the same audio sample play at the same time, this can also happen if similar sounds within the same frequency spectrum play at the same time. We resolved this issue by managing the audio with a more strict method and by adding chance to some of the audio triggers, the chance is only for the vocalization of our characters. Some iteration has been done to the overall mix as well, setting new global values to some of our busses to emphasize the player and their interaction within our game.

Overall, a productive stretch—lots of foundational stuff improved, and we’re getting closer to that fluid, exciting gameplay we’re aiming for.