[DevLog] Polish Sprint Week 2

The end of the polish sprint  is here and this also marks the end of the required time we had to put in our game project.This of course doesn’t mean that’s its over, far from it, more playtesting,fixing bugs,polishing and preparing our trailer for the presentation day are already in order.

During this week our main focus was making the game more fun.This meant we had to tweak things like how often we spawn items and which type should be spawned more often.How fast the player falls of the map, how dangerous the ufo enemy should be etc.Of course not excluding additions on the art side , more animations to make the snake more interesting, more particle effects that help the user know what is happening on the screen but also to make the visuals more interesting.

This week’s first topic was:

1)Should we force the game into a sudden death mode to avoid stalemate?

We noticed that sometimes round time might vary, from 1 minute to 5 or even more.This might lead sometimes to frustration or even boredom.Our first idea was to make more hamster balls spawn when one team was closer to winning so that the enemy team has the chance to retaliate but to also ensure the game will sortly finish, making it more interesting.

2)What can we do in this little time to improve our snake’s behaviour?

Our snake’s movement and general behavior seems a bit stale at the moment so to make it more interesting for the players we made the area that it moves bigger which means the players will have to move a bit more around the grid but also make it a bit more challenging to score.We added a magnet in the snake’s mouth instead of making the hitbox huge.We thought that would make the players life easier while also maintaining the aforementioned challenge and last but not least we added the tail whip animation which will push the octopi that are near its tail away.

3)How can we improve the movement of the players in the field?

It was mentioned during the last review that compared to the size of the grid the players are moving slower than they should, to fix this we decrease the cooldown on the dash ability but also changed our gravity value, which helped a lot on how the players move in the field.

4)Can we improve how our bombs work?

We thought that some of the bombs could work a bit better than they already do so we changed the behavior of some of them, for example the freeze bomb now explodes on impact and doesn't go first into countdown mode, also small tweak in how the shock ball and the normal bomb were introduced(increased potency).

Presentation Plans

With almost everything done and just a bit of playtesting and finetuning left, we have to prepare our game trailer which most probably will prove to be a daunting task and in addition our presentation for our exam day!