[DevLog] Polish Sprint Week 1 

The end of the first polish sprint week brought many small improvements to the core gameplay and our visuals .The main focus this week was to fix any glaring bugs in our gameplay,refactor parts of our code which hindered our game’s performance(and apparently our build) but also improve the look and feel of our visuals.

On the code side of things we improved some scripts which are vital to our core gameplay (like the item spawner,not using costly functions in the hot path of our code etc.) .

As for our in-game Art assets, we spent the first week of our final Sprint polishing textures, particle effects and improving the user experience with our reworked tutorial. This was specially to make sure the tutorial visually completes the style of the overall UI of the game. Also, the tiles, making up the platform our octopi and snake are moving on, had a bit of a make-over: they are shining now in new colours, fitting to the overall colour scheme of our environment and chunkier, rounder shapes as our art bible dictates. We are planning to spend the rest of the Sprint on adding more layers to our particle effects, refining some animations and rendering our assets as readable and shiny as we possibly can!

The first topic for this week was

1)Is our game too chaotic at the moment?

After the addition of all the main features in the game , we felt that at times there’s too much going on the screen and it’s especially difficult for newcomers to adjust to the speed of the game.To combat this we added bigger penalty to the players that go out of bounds but also get stunned, giving some time to the players before the tiles start to drop down and making the ui less intrusive to the whole experience.

2)How can we make hitting other players/feeding the snake easier while keeping the challenge at a healthy level?

We decided to actually increase the size of our hamster balls and bombs which helped a lot in this regard.Another thing we are also already working on is having the balls/bombs leave a particle trail while  flying.We believe that this will make them more readable in the field of play.

3)Does our Ui clutter the screen maybe too much?

We already knew that we should change the placeholder Ui inside the game  to a Ui which fitted more the colors of the game but also didn’t take much screen space even when 4 players are playing the game.We already had our first Ui mock up and we switched the placeholder one with the now completed hud.

4)Do we have to refactor big parts of our code and if we can how many parts can we afford to rewrite?

Of course having spend these last months working on the group project we can finally make some self reflection  and see which parts of our code are badly written and need changes and which can withstand the passing of time.Although with the time remaining we have to be careful and try to fix as much as time allows us.Cleaning up the code is fairly simple for the scope of our project and maybe even then in our case it wouldn’t help the most important problems in our code.The main action we had to take during this week was cleaning up unneeded scripts and removing code which resulted in needless memory acquisition.

Polish Sprint Week 2 Plans

The final week of the polish sprint is upon us!With most of the bugs fixed and almost all of our visuals ready and polished , we will continue to playtest our game to spot things that we need to potentially fix but also take our time to improve the balance in the game’s mechanics.Almost there!