Hello and welcome back to our weekly devlog! This week was.... oof tough boy. 

After playtesting we realized the game was not going in the direction we wanted it to. Mechanics that started off simple and fun grew more and more complex. In the end, it was just not that fun to play, nor was the game any intuitive. The game needed a change.

Art

Pimp your penguins

Agne

This week was all about patching up this semi-sinking ship. We semi-made it! I spent the past days working really close with the programmers, just doing exactly what they needed me to do and nothing else so that we could have a working prototype at the end. 

Since we had some major changes in the gameplay we had to adapt the looks a little bit. I redid all the cannon indicator icons so they would not appear pixelated in game. Also took the time to make them a little bit better.

A new target indicator was needed, so i quickly took care of that as well. This is also in serious need of some restyling action, but more on that later.

Last but not least, I did some maintenance on the character model. We changed up quite some stuff regarding the reeling mechanics and the character required some rework. I split up the meshes and created some extra bones to allow the programmers to work easily with what we had. I also redid all the UVs because apparently they got lost somewhere in between all the versions of the models we had! 

In between all the checking out reimporting and submitting I did also find time for something a bit more creative.
I started working a bit on UI. I made a first draft of what is going to be out main menu! 

Looking back at the art bible i took some color palette references and tried out a couple layouts, and I ended up with this. The background is going to be a render from the game arena itself, since we still don't have the final product  I will wait until the end to have a final version.
I did make the buttons so that they have a hovered version and a basic one, just to give the menu more of a polished look while we wait for a decent background.

Jens

Whilst others were cooking up some wizard code and art magic, i was working on the powerup textures for our game.

I also made a quick snowball to visualize as our projectile for the cannon. It is not yet in our build but it shall next time. 

The swapping vfx was also made by me this week. I reused the cloud particle texture of the cannon impact to visualize the swapping.

Coding

Reeling Mechanic

Ioana

The Reeling Mechanic might be the one that suffered the most changes. After all, it is our main mechanic. 

Defending

Defending was one of the extras that needlessly complicated the game. It was not clear how the system worked, and it also made the gameplay quite harder. So, after discussing it with the team, we decided to cut it out.

That's ~5 hours of work gone 🥲

Reeling

The reeling itself was also non-intuitive. The way it worked was you had to press a button to throw the hook, then press the button again after the target has been hooked, at the right time, to reel the target in. Wait too long, and the reel loses power. Wait even longer, and the target will be unhooked. Try to press the button before the hook reached target, and it canceled. Canceling after hooking was also possible. 

There was just so much to it... 😵‍💫

So basically, we reworked the whole thing.

Other ~5h of work lost 

So how does the reeling work now?

You hold a button. Target preview starts moving forward. Let go of the button. Hook is thrown towards the target. 

How does that look?

It looks good.

What happens if you try to reel with no target in view?

You reel in air, but something happens! All buttons actually do something!

Auto-aim

After playtesting the new way of reeling a bit, we realized it might be a bit complicated to actually reach your target. Which is where the auto-aim comes in.

Problem solver.

Scoring system

So, uh... yeah... we removed that. Hours of work gone again 🥲 

We decided there were far more important things to focus on right now, and the scoring system was bringing in complexity that we didn't particularly need. The game is now fun without. 

How does one win/lose then?

At the end of the round, whoever is the cannon loses, and the penguins are all winners 🙂.

Gameplay loop

Another very important thing I took care of this week was having a fully implemented gameplay loop. No, we did not really have that yet. Yes, it has been 7 weeks.

We had a selection menu, and then there's the main scene, so I made a very simple menu UI for after the timer runs out.

Beautiful, I know. But it works.

Bug fixing

Game breaking bugs. Everywhere. Keeping you up at night. Creeping in your thoughts. 

Until I fixed them. So now I can sleep well again 😌

• swapping only worked when the hit player was close to the cannon target's center
• penguin colors were not assigned correctly, or not at all
• changing scenes removed one player somehow
• players could reel inside the selection menu

Bottom line

This week was hard 🥲. But we survived it and the game is so much better now!

My Improvements

Balder

When you make multiple complex systems within a game, those complex systems will have to work together nicely and it has to feel nice to play the game.

After multiple playtests, listening to user feedback, and jotting down everything that's wrong we realized an issue: the game is not intuitive nor fun to play. We discussed a bunch of changes we could make to improve this and dedicated our week to fixing this in the hopes of making the game intuitive and fun for anyone to play.

Cannon

Of course the cannon was the first thing to receive improvements, the following fixes have been made:

• The cannon now aims directly to where the player is targeting
• The target colour of the cannon is now the colour of the actual player controlling it (this is actually and old bug that has been fixed)
• The range of the cannon has been significantly increased to make the cannon a bigger thread and more difficult to escape
• The cannon target now flashes and shakes the controller when the cannon is on a cooldown to communicate the cooldown to the player
• The cannon now instantly destroys ice instead of taking 2 shots to destroy ice

Overall

• There has been a bigger focus on fixing bugs that that made the game less playable
• We prioritized tasks that focus on user feedback in order to better communicate with the player what is going on

In other words, we gutted out a lot of our existing work and decided to simplify our game significantly. This took significant time and effort from all the developers, along with the emotional pain of killing your darlings.

Lesson learnt: don't over-scope and overcomplicate your game when you don't know if all these complex systems will work well together. There's still a lot to be improved and added that will be discussed, but overall after playtesting, the results seem positive and the game feels a lot more fun to play.

Game design

Arthur

As you have read by the other developers. There was a lot of scrapping.
I have done a bunch of play testing with multiple people. that's why sadly these cuts where made as we need to focus on our core game mechanic.

The main feedback that we got was:

• When pressing A it comes out really fast and then when I press it again it cancels? Why would I want that?
• What is the range of the rope?
• Why is on the rope. go, pulling and canceling all on the same button? Feels weird.
• Aiming with 2 sticks feels weird.
• If you press shoot nothing happens. (no player feedback)
• Switching between penguin and cannon is not clear
• Didn't see the timer

We also saw player behavior that we didn't want. Like just standing around doing nothing. This happens because the cannon was not a thread at all for the players. Because the cannon range was way too small. Player where running too fast.  And a bunch of other factors.

The problem was that we had a lot of system all doing different things and not working together to make a great game. So I wanted to make it as simple as possible so we don't have a lot of variables to change. And make sure the core game play loop is fun.

We cut a lot of content like the score, rope and cannon features.

There is now a full game loop with a start and a end ;D. Now we can start iterating more closely to make the game FUN.

My work in this was mostly guiding everyone into the new vision of the game and saying "NO" to all the ideas.

We hope you liked the work we put in this week, and we can't wait for you to

Come back for next week!

Have a blessed day! 🌟