Production Sprint 2 Commenced

With the end of sprint one leaving us with a broken project,
leaking oxygen and with life-support systems down,
sprint 2 will require a careful slingshot manoeuvre to get us back on optimal trajectory.

Our dev-team has spent the first week bug-fixing our player movement and bouncing mechanics
The art department finalized the player characters, some of the pickups and got started on the juice: realtime FX.

Realtime FX

We're done setting up the base for most of the obvious effects we'll need.
Once these are tied into the game logic, we'll most likely push them to their full potential in the polishing sprint (sprint 3).

To kick things off, player elimination:
Since players are eliminated off screen, we needed a violent, very noticeable effect to convey the message to all players,
leaving no room for doubt that a participant has met his demise.

You may or may not have noticed the flumes of leaking oxygen bursting through that effect, so next I'll list our other air-related effects.

Firstly the thruster effect:

I wanted to cram as much information as I could into this fairly innocuous effect to go with our diegetic UI on the player suits.
Obviously the spray direction is tangent to the player impulse, but alongside that the length of the spray reflects the strength of the impulse (or how far the stick is pushed on the gamepad) and furthermore, the width of the spray reflects how much propellant the player has left in the tank (wide spray for a full tank, thin spray when nearing empty).

The emergency brake:

The emergency brake is one of our game's pick-ups, all of which should have their own distinct effects.

The tractor beam:

This effect spans between two players, so there was some figuring out to be done, but everything's in place now and further iterations should be fairly straightforward.

The forcefield blast:

Not quite a blast yet, but I wanted some distinct visual in place to make sure all pickup effects are easy to spot and recognize.

The gravity mine:

And the last of our pickups, the gravity mine, for which the effect was created a while ago, but added here for completeness' sake!

Last but not least, a game about bouncing should have a queue for when a bounce happens, especially since there's a shared camera so screen-shake isn't necessarily the best option available.
I've kept it subtle for now, we'll need to assess how intense this effect should be when all game logic is back in place:

Player characters and pickup assets

A little fresnel needs to be added still to make them pop some more, but here's our characters lined up!

And to make sure you fully appreciate our love of emissive stuff, here's the current state of our pickup assets:

Same as with the characters, we'll make some edits to the shaders to make the silhouettes more readable.
PlayStation users can probably already guess what overall shape our two remaining pickups will have!

Weekly build

The control scheme hasn't changed since the last couple of weeks, so feel free to download our weekly build and check out where we're at.

Signing out for now.
See you next week,

Team Sumonauts