DevLog #9 - The polish phase is here!

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We are really close to finishing our game! Right now we are in, we call it, polish week! This is a time where we try to make finishing touches to our project, that includes some game balancing, polishing our assets, making sure it runs smooth and most importantly that the game itself is fun.

So we started with some extra filling assets like  rocks. Different rocks will make for more organic cliffs around the map, as they use the procedural snow material it will be easier to scatter them around and get more variation.

Next we, created these crows they will now be sitting on wires across the environment, making it more alive and interesting.

When it comes to other assets we added snow on top of our assets.

Next, we created some more variations for our trees, benches and hopefully next week we will try to have more variations of the bushes.

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When talking abouty our vegetation, we managed to create a wind shader, now our trees and bushes are swinging resulting in more alive environment.

While trying to create our environment more alive and coherent for the eye, we added 2 more particles, when our player runs around, he will throw up some snow behind them. And to put the cherry on top of the wooden cabins in our world, there is now smoke coming out of the chimneys.

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Next we made the post-processing inside unity (without LUT because that didn’t work) for both the normal game state and the snowstorm.

We also added reflection probes to cover the different sections. It used to be 1 big reflection probe, now there are 6 of them. We also added some subtle light variations (colour and strength).

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The game over art was made along with some improvements to the existing UI elements

And for the sound, we improved the timing, volume and pitch of all the sounds that are in our project. The snowball throw, impact, and the according grunts of the characters were added to the project. We also started to make the sounds for the ranged enemy.

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In our game, we have planned to have ice, but until now it was without any gameplay intention, we just had it there. Now you gain a speed boost, but your character rotates much slower.

The snow deforms and stays deformed even after the snowballs are destroyed.  Based on the timing of the snowstorm, the snow will regenerate! Make sure to keep enough snow to survive the waves of enemies coming for you.

For other code-related stuff we added safety code to prevent errors from happening during the runtime and cleaned the code as well as fixing a bunch of errors and warnings that had been building up in our code.

And that's it for this week. See you next time in our final devlog!