Baking the Slice of the Cake
Hey everyone! This is it! The last week before our game gets to do its first drive to an eager public waiting to see how this game has developed since its original pitch. Hard to believe we are finally here as we polish everything we can with our remaining time, but as always let’s take a look at some of the highlights from this week:
Improved collision system
New audio
Camera shake effects
New visual effects and particle system
First draft of new UI
Revised Arena
Power up tweaks
Bumpy Ride
These last few weeks have been all about getting everything to feel right to the players, that means from driving controls, to collisions, to power ups, and pretty much everything they get to experience in the game. As mentioned before on previous updates, the main one would be to reward players when they bump into other players and send them flying, aka the sumo aspect of the game. Hitting another player in the game is quite rewarding and one of the best parts of the game as we have hoped but it’s hard to achieve during a match. So we’ve made some tweaks to make it even more rewarding and a bit easier in hopes players can be able to hit each other more easily.
One of those tweaks would be our improved collision system that Jason has been working on that handles those clashes better through our networking system. To explain it briefly, this new system uses Lerping and prediction of player positions. It is more complicated than it sounds ( a lot more) but this helps deal with potential lag in our game. As any online player would know, even a second of lag could make a huge difference.
To add further to encouraging players to collide more, Robin has added some cool new camera shake effects that will further immerse the player into feeling that “ramming speed”. It is still under test but so far it seems that it does its job!
We reverted back to basics in terms of our arena designs to aid in the goal of easier collisions. That on top of a few more tweaks to our jumping mechanics, have made collisions more possible than before. Cars are flying in the air more than ever. So far creating an arena that works with our gameplay has been one of the biggest challenges for the game. Upon reflection, designing arenas with points of interests for power ups or higher risks areas of falling down will be part of the game but our design will probably have to stick to somehow flat designs on the meantime. Verticality and levels make sense in games like twisted metal and other car combat games where the goal is to destroy other vehicles, however since our game takes inspiration from Rocket League, their stages are flat to allow players to reach the ball at all times without any disruptions other than the players. So while we do want to eventually implement more interactivity with our arena, in this case for our game the ‘ball’ is the other players. So we will have to continue testing how we can blend the flat style of Rocket League arenas with more shooter based ones like Twisted Metal.
(Our Main Arena during the day)
There many more details that our technical wizards Robin and Jason have done to polish our game to make it as balanced as it can be. This week we have been more in synchronization to make the power ups not only work better but also look better. In this case we added some rough particle effects to the cannon shots and missiles for players to be able to get a better sense of where their shots are headed and whether they’ll be able to hit their targets. Not only that but we have made a couple of more adjustments so players are also able to see more efficiently relevant data such as damage they have taken in a more visual way in terms of UI and UX.
Raise Shields
One example of these new aesthetic programming revamps would be our new hexagon shield that is a UX representation of the player’s health. Not only does this visualise the player’s own status but also the state of other players that is visible at all times. This was some crucial feedback from past playtests as players more or less were able to figure out their own health with the old UI and were pretty much clueless about how much damage they inflicted to others. To address this we are trying two new things to give more feedback to the player, the first would be this new shield made by Ring and the second one would be our brand new UI made by me.
(New shield particle effect done by Ring)
Interactive Driver’s Manual 2.0
The main challenge with our old UI is that players were rarely aware of it and what each icon represented. Those who were able to get the gist of it managed to do it but only after a while of playing the game. Furthermore another major problem is that players constantly confused their health icon with the boost energy icon. In some cases players weren’t even aware that there was a health/ damage system. But with our new implementations, at least with the shield, players now usually ask “Is that my health?”, so it seems this idea could work as we continue to experiment and adjust it. On my end as the UI artist, I’ve come up with a new UI from scratch following the same tasks as before from my first iteration and definitely feels like an improvement. Not only are the icons more visible and distinguishable between one another , but they are also in a more suitable positions without blocking crucial space during a match. This new UI iteration in combination with the new shield has made a few players make the connection “Oh so when the shield switches to red that means I took a lot of damage and I fly more when someone bumps into me”. We hope that as we continue to improve it more and more players are able to make similar connections in the game.
(Our old UI)
(Some experiments with it)
(New UI 2.0 !)
New Visuals on the way
Even though the team’s main focus has been game play and the technical side of the game, the art members of Swift Limit Games have also been hard at work to make all the amazing progress our programmers, Robin and Jason, have done be more visual to our audiences. Meaning that even we are already making plans on cool new visuals to bring into the game: More vehicles, more arenas, and more UI icons for our menus as we make our game more presentable to the general public. Our artist from CSUN Martha, has also been delivering fantastic work that we have implemented every week, from the environment visuals to our arena, our Gatling gun cannon, power up props, and more to come as we plan our next steps for production.
Visuals are not the only department that has shown their incredible work, as we have our sound team from San Francisco State University who have delivered us some new sounds to make our game an even better experience with all those little details. Car engines, tires, explosions, clashes, music, our sound team is getting ready for a new batch of sounds that will make our Vertical Slice demo feel even more polished and closer to our vision.
The focus of these last couple of weeks, as mentioned on previous updates have been on polish rather than new implementations and I’m more than glad to say that it has paid off. There will always be things that need constant revisions and tweaking at every stage of the game and little things there and there but so far it seems we’ve dealt efficiently with any game breaking bugs or glitches (as far as we know) so we’re keeping our fingers crossed as we continue to do our internal playtests to ensure quality.
That’s all for today folks. This week has brought back memories of when this game was first pitched as we prepare to present our progress, and with the same energy and enthusiasm we will continue forward. Until next week!