Prototype sprint week 2

Our prototype is finished and playable. You can play it with controllers for 4 players. 

The controls for PlayStation are: left joystick to move, right joystick to rotate, R2 to attack, X to jump, L2 to dash.

Question we asked ourselves

What make our game special?

In this week we have found the answers to the questions we asked ourselves. The most important one was ‘What makes our game special?’. We have put a lot of thought in it and came to the conclusion that we can use the stage switch between heaven and hell to make our game unique. We first wanted the players to fight each other in heaven and hell, but than there was no difference between the stages. So we decided to change the objective in heaven. The objective in heaven is to push the players of the level, which is the only way to damage them. They can do this with ranged weapons an dashing. In hell the players can damage their opponents with melee weapons and stun each other for a certain amount of time by jumping on top of the characters.

How to do the stage switch?

We also wondered how we were going to implement the stage switch. We decided to use corruption points. Individual corruption points are obtained in hell by damaging the other players. The total amount of corruption stacks and when it reaches its maximum amount the stage switches to heaven. We used the opportunity that corruption points made to add a feature that would make our game more special. If the player has a lot of corruption they will be moving slower in heaven. But this is unfortunately this isn’t available in the prototype from this week.

Problems

colliders

The problems that we had this week where colliders. We used a lot of colliders to detect certain things, but it became confusing. We decided that for melee combat we would use raycasting instead.

Melee fighting

The size and speed of the melee weapons also proved to be a problem. It was difficult to hit an other player because the weapon was to small, so we had to make it bigger. The combat was also too slow and we sped up the animation of the attack.

Ranged fighting

The most difficult problem that we faced was the orientation of the arrows for heaven. We made the arrows in 3dsMax, but the orientation in unity came out wrong. We tried to find what the problem was but couldn’t find it. Because it is a prototype we just made it a child of an empty game object, but for the real game we need to find the solution.

Another problem with the arrows is that the point of impact is too small, which makes it difficult to hit an opponent. In the main game we need to make the point of impact larger.

general

A problem that we can’t fix is that we only have one artist. The artist has to make the artwork by herself, but since we are with three programmers we try to help her with her art where we can. But it will still be a lot of work for the artist alone.

What went good?

Some things went good this week. The corruption point system works really well and the level switch too. For the level switch we decided to put the stages next to each other in the world so that the players can teleport to the stages. We did this because it was more difficult and time consuming to make one stage disappear and the other appear.

Next week

For next week we will begin with the main game.