Overview

Hello all! As softs are approaching fastly, we are working hard to wrap things up and finalize the implementation of our core features. We planned this week to have a game loop by the end of the week but changed our schedule a little bit after some feedback from faculty.

Progress over the Week:

We were highly focused on completing the features we have in our design doc this week. However we got some feedback from faculty playtesters saying that they still do not feel the need to cooperate with other players and they felt that blocking each other was not a good solution to enforce working together. This was a huge issue for us since our goal was to encourage cooperation between players.

So designers spent the week mapping out a new feature that will be implemented over the weekend. They came up with a mechanic where two cannons can merge their forces and shoot dual color bullets to take down dual color enemies. This mechanic not only allowed us to remove blocking and encourage working together, it is also easy to teach the players without too much complication because it is derived from an existing color coded enemy mechanic.

The rest of the team kept working on adding features in during the week. Artists created environment changes. New ice cream and honey planet environment were implemented into the game. Our programmers created all the functions necessary for the boss so that designers can create the boss behaviour using the tools and easily tweak when necessary. All the enemy patterns are completed and the checkpoints structure was implemented. We also made some tweaks on the UI and end-game screens.

Next Steps:

Next week is our final week to get everything in for the softs and for our playtest on April 18th. We will also implement the new merged cannon mechanic and most importantly create meaningful enemy waves for that design. The team is also considering dropping special bullet feature because of lack of enemies to correspond with those. We will have our final decision next week.