Devlog 9: Sprint 2 Week 3

This is and was our final week of production, the next phase will be polish. That means we halt all features and additions to our game and polish what we have and what works!

Art

Since this is our last week of production we had to finalize all our visuals. That includes UI, both the level scene and the menu scene, finalizing animations, fixing some issues that we noticed. 

UI

For starters a main menu screen was made which includes 2D drawn assets in a 3D background, with the options of Play, Quit and last but not least the Credits button, which shows all of our helping hands in this project.

The Death Zone now has a cool intimidating visual look with saws ready to crush our players.

We also made some extra UI elements, such as, pause, a countdown and a player stats list.

Environment

We've fully decorated main menu scene.

Apart from that many minor issues were fixed. Such as the animation for the hydraulic press, the size of the conveyor belt teeth, the post-processing volume and etc.

Code

Patch Notes

• New Features

  • Credits Screen: Added a dedicated screen to showcase the development team.

  • Controller Support: Implemented controller-friendly UI navigation for menus.

  • Player Trails: Added trail renderers to players for enhanced visual feedback during movement.

• Visual & UX Improvements

  • Smooth Camera & Death Zone: Improved camera transitions and death zone behavior for a more polished gameplay experience.

  • Scene Transitions: Added smooth transitions between levels and menus for better flow.

Audio

The only real audio addition to our project is an audio call triggered by overlapping with the DangerZone that keeps growing larger toward the centre. How the audio is being mixed however took some twists and turns.
I love being able to control the threshold of a master bus as much as possible, the built-in audio compressor component of Unity allows to do that, but it does not allow for a 'brickwall' or limiter method, so I had to get creative. 

I aggregate the entire mix in a MasterPrivate bus that sends all audio to the actual Master bus with very specific compressor settings shown in the screenshot below.

The result is having a lot of control and extra safety to prevent audio clipping on our master, pretty neat huh?

Because the audio was in a final stage pretty quickly this week most of my time was trying to reduce performance issues such as shadow rendering, anti-aliasing frustrum issues and helping our coders and artists with some minor implementation issues. We're so close to ready!