Production has come to it’s definite ending! This does, however, not mean our game is finished. We still have another few weeks of work ahead of us. Those two weeks will be focused on polishing all the content and mechanics we currently have in the game. Before that, let’s look at what we’ve been up to over the course of last week.

Art and Levels

Last week we almost finished the first room. This week, we’re happy to announce that that room is finished, and we managed to add some extra rooms as well! We now have 3 playable rooms, each offering their own kind of challenge. These should give the player a good idea of what they could expect in a full game, since we are still making a vertical slice after all. We also added an ending room, to show the player they have finished the game! We won’t show this in the devlog, for obvious reasons.

Aside from building new rooms there was a myriad of small tasks and tweaks that needed to be finished. Bryan did a lot of texturing this week, making sure that more complex materials look like their real-world counterpart. He also spent some time tweaking UI things and making small changes to traps. 

Iben finished work on Mr. Sniffles, who is now an animated man, after some rigging and animation treatment. Digital veterinarian isn’t his only job, he’s also a skilled carpenter, making some nice planks to replace our temporary cube planks. In true carpenter fashion, he’s also had to fill the mousetraps with some cheese.

As for me, I also had some small tasks to work on. I started by applying some teacher’s feedback on a particle effect from the earlier sprint and making a new one for stunned enemies. I followed that up by working on the outline shader some more. I was tasked to make the outline thickness more consistent across different screen sizes and resolutions. And as far as we know, I succeeded.

Programming

Since we are ending production it’s best to finish as many features as possible, in order to reach a complete feeling product. We can finish them in polish anyway. So that’s what the programmers did this week! The biggest improvement are the main menu and the fat mouse. The main menu now has a nice overview of the level, which looks a whole lot better than just a tiling texture, in our humble opinion. And as mentioned before, the fat mouse looks a lot more animated than before. This also needs code to work properly.

Some new smaller things were also added. Like the scoreboard, high score. Our game now has an actual goal. At least for competitive people. Some other aspects needed tweaking on the coding end as well. The book trap has been mostly rewritten by Keanu while Nicholas worked on the hook, both are a lot more fun to use now. 

Conclusion

I believe our second production sprint was a success! We managed to get a vertical slice that works for 95%, which is a vast improvement from the ending of the first sprint. While the levels have improved in both design and looks, a lot of this thanks to the improvement we made on the enemy AI, animations and smaller tweaks to the handling of the characters. See you next week!