This week has been crazy. It was our last production week, and after a meeting in which we decided how we would continue, everyone did a last, amazing effort to get the game practically done. Of course, it’s not like the game is actually finished - there are bugs, there are rough edges, there is stuff that doesn’t 100% work as it should - but all mechanics are in, the menu’s are there, the UI is wired up etc.

Choices, choices

During last weeks’ meeting, we quickly realized that we would not get everyhting in. We needed to drop a few things, while keeping the game fun. In the end, we decided we would drop the enemy skills and instead change their base stats to have some differences between the types. This worked out quite well, and as the game progresses you really do feel this difference between the enemies. Some hit really hard, others can take quite a punch, and some race across the planetsurface.
On the other hand, we decided that the player, who had no skills at all until last week, should keep as much of the planned things as possible. Result: an absolute race against the clock, and a shield, shooting pattern, bomb, and long-living bullet. Some of these have some very rough edges, but that will be fixed in the coming sprint, when we start addressing all known bugs.

Amazing menu’s

Another thing we have added, are the menu’s. You will finally get a “game over” with your score, you have a menu, help pages, and you can quit the game without having to press alt f4.

Cracks, cracks and more cracks

While there is still something going wrong with the complete breaking of the tiles - something we are currently still looking for -, they now visualize their health. As player, you will be able to see what tiles are safe to stand on and what tiles are close to breaking. At the end, an animation is supposed to play, showing the tile break into pieces and fall into the planetcore, but it’s the firing of that animation that still goes wrong. When this last bit is fixed, the tiles will be finished!
Ps.: be carefull when standing on ice next to a hole in the planet… You might just slide in.

Finishing touches

Apart from the more noticable stuff, some smaller things have changed as well. The player got an update, mainly to give him some glowing parts and to fix his animations. The research pickup now has a mesh, instead of the placeholder one that was used last week. The core has changed a little, we fixed the dark side of the planet to be less dark. The player’s rotation has been finetuned a bit, although it still isn’t entirely as we’d wish. We might be forgetting some stuff here, we all have somewhat lost track of who did what and when.

Next week(s)

From now on, bugfixes, finetuning, sound and FX are the things we will focus on. No new stuff, only better old stuff. As for the FX, here is a little taste of what is to come: