Hey Ninjas!

 It's been a while, we may have fallen behind on doing these… Good news; a lot has happened that we get to talk about, including…

• New levels
• Countless visual improvements
• UI overhauls
• New music and sound effects
• An updated tag system
• Items
• Settings
• Social medias
• Online multiplayer
• We even won and were nominated for several awards! 

We’ll go through a surface-level explanation of most features we have implemented in the past few months, saving many of the finer details for future (hopefully consistent) devlog releases. 

Recent Additions

New maps:

We now have 12 maps in the game. They have been altered several times based on heat maps we generated using play data. Maps include all different kinds of styles, plays, and of course, trampolines. 

Visual Improvements:

A couple of visual effects and shaders have been added to the game:

• Paint Splatter VFX: Kills and item contact on walls will trigger a small splatter of paint droplets.
• Spray Cloud VFX: There is a new spray cloud particle effect that is more aligned with the rest of the art style for our game. 
• Color Patterns: Players now have the option to enable patterns on their paint, allowing for a secondary way to distinguish different colors.

Multiplayer: 

Our game is now able to be played over Steam using their online services. Players will be able to connect to games hosted by those on their friends list. We ran into a few issues trying to migrate our mechanics to a networking solution, primarily with trampolines, which delayed our expected schedule for finishing online multiplayer by a few weeks.

Recent Changes

UI:

Tags: 

 Previously known as glyphs, we have added eight different tags to the game, which are triggered whenever a player presses/holds the tag button. Tags are picked randomly, and their size depends on how long the player holds down the tag button.

Items: 

In the last devlog we axed one of our game modes and converted its components to items. However, after internal playtesting, we have decided to remove the quill and inkwell from the game as they weren’t working well in our playtests.

Team Accomplishments

Social medias:

We are going to start being more active on our social medias as we get closer to publishing on Steam. Feel free to check out our Linktree and follow us to keep updated.

https://linktr.ee/olympusinteractivegroup 

Awards:

We attended two awards shows in the past month and received two awards and two nominations. We were awarded with best Experimental and Accessibility at RIT’s EDGE Showcase and were nominated for Excellence in Design and Stupid Fun at RPI GameFest. 

Moving Forward

At this point, we believe Ninjas on Trampolines is feature complete. We do not plan to add any new features into the game until after it releases on Steam. Our main priorities going forward will be to finish online multiplayer and polish our art/UI. Speaking of releasing to Steam, we are in the process of creating our game’s page. We can’t say for sure when this page will be available, but we are getting close. 

To keep updated with everything related to our game, join our discord where we will be posting more frequently, and you can directly ask us questions.  https://discord.gg/DgFe8qdCYG

Until next time!

Olympus Interactive