Short video showing off the new grabbable objects and the in-game UI to help the player
This sprint is the second to last sprint before Midterms for Capstone Production and we need to be feature complete before next week. The main things I worked on were UI functionality and layout and finished up all the design decisions for the game. For Toybox since polish is such a vital portion of the game feel itself I have also been working on the major systems of the game and how the game feel affects that.
UI Changes
The main additions to the UI include the new Main Menu screen that lets the player choose between the normal game and the upcoming Credits/Kiosk mode; More on those on a later blog 😉
The Overworld UI has also been changed to allow the player to switch special abilities before entering a level and will also be able to view the upgrades that they have purchased so far. The bar on the top shows the progress towards the next upgrade and since I was working on the functionality aspect of the UI, the UI images themselves are not final and will be updated after the midterm crunch.
There is also now a pause menu screen and a screen for unlocking special abilities that help the player flow through the information that is given to them. These are all finalized in terms of functionality and layout.
Gameplay Updates
Some exciting new changes to the major gameplay loop have been finalized, including changing player movement and enemy movement to make the gameplay flow much more smoothly and the down state has been fully implemented.
The player movement was originally very sticky and by switching over to a floatingMovementComponent I was able to completely get rid of the sticky-ness as well as incorporate player acceleration with the movement. This feels so much more satisfying for the player and has been a huge change with Quality Assurance as well. The bullet speed from the player was greatly reduced in order to let the players visually see where they were shooting and already this has made a big change in how players tend to use their bounce shots.
The enemy movement was changed to use Nav Meshes so now the enemies will never get stuck on any walls or each-other again either. This was another change that was bound to happen with all the new enemies that we are introducing and it has made the game flow just like it should.
Finally the downed state being implemented has made it so players can understand the new death mechanics without any explanation and the visual effects Bryce was able to put on the player model are outstanding.
Next Week…
For next blog, I will be uploading an entire playthrough of our first chapter, with all the levels being finalized both layout and visually. The only changes that might happen in the future being polish means this video will be the closest thing to how the final game will turn out!
Ethan Loewald 