This week

This week, the focus of the development was on polishing the game responsiveness to the player controls to give the player a larger window of time to understand and respond to the result of their actions with less frustration, as well as updating the game with more variety and differences between the waves, implementing a more complex inventory system and corresponding UI.

Art

A major point of focus for the art team this week consisted of finalizing the buildings and road tiles for the environment, the player animation, and the UI icons for the redirects and inventory within the game:

Some adjustments were made to the colour palette to set apart the regular buildings from the enemy ones, which will be reflected in the next coming milestone. 

Music

This week, the music team has delivered many SFX for car collisions, ranging from car horns and tire screeches to glass shattering noises.

Dev

In preparation for the alpha, numerous adjustments were made for the playtest:

• Integration of the assets from the art and music teams to recreate the environment for a more polished and immersive feel:

• Enemy ribbon trails were implemented for a better visualization apart from the arrows of the redirects of the path the enemies will take to reach the goal. The smooth trail creation includes an animation progression of where the trail branches start or end and indicates when a new enemy appears with a different path, while following a similar colour scheme to the enemy vehicles.
• The placement of redirects were implemented with a more interactive response to player actions through the controls, in which the player can now hold the A button (South for gamepad) to toggle a circular disk at the next intersection as a landmark for which intersection that redirect will affect. As the player holds the A button, the disk will persist until the player releases the button, and the player can move the player car until they approach the intersection. Once the intersection is reached, the disk will merge into an arrow pointing into the direction the player will turn and create a redirect. When the button is released, the player will commit that directional change and turn that direction while creating a redirect.
• Further polish to the UI was created with tweening, integrating the icons for the UI and creating a new wave banner that will appear in the middle of the screen to signify a new wave starting and fade out after a short period of time.

Features

A new inventory system was implemented, with a single inventory item at the moment: the construction site!

The construction site will spawn at intervals during certain waves that the player can drive towards to collect, thus updating the UI to show the construction site is in their inventory. Then, the player can press the X button (West button for gamepad) when the item is in their inventory to release the item, dynamically changing the environment for a certain amount of time to cause more road mayhem!

What's Next

Feedback will be collected from the alpha presentation to further inform the next steps, but for now the next steps are to continue polishing the controls for player responsiveness, as well as adding to the inventory system and UI for greater immersion and UX.