We’ve made it! We finished our game! After 11 weeks of hard work and a lot of fun we can finally show you the vision we had for our game. The build attached to this devlog is the final version of this project. On a sadder note, this is also the final devlog. Before we say goodbye, however, let’s have a look at what we’ve been up to this final week.

Art

This week has been a polishing week, just like the last one.  This means a lot of small improvements focused on the game feel. Last week we finished 99% of the art which means we got to focus on the gameplay and audio.

Bryan was honestly the only artist working on actual game art this week. The control and explanation screens in the menu were in desperate need of a facelift since they used sketches and text from our concepting phase way back in early days of the project. Some new art was made for this and I have to say, it looks a lot clearer now.

 Last week I spent some of my time a on tutorial room for the player. This room should teach them how to use the hook to dash over gaps. While the setup of the room was ok, the player needed some more incentive to throw his hook at the wall, frustration alone is not enough nor is it fun. All we needed was a smug looking mouse that was just begging to get a hook to the nose. I mean look at him, isn’t he asking for it?

Last week, one of our programmers went way over time fixing a bug, which is not a problem of course. But that did mean some of his that some of his tasks needed to be redistributed. Iben and I decided to carry the brunt of these tasks. Iben pivoted away from some of the less important tasks and looked for new sounds to put into our game. Audio is really important to the feel of the game, so we decided to prioritize this over small improvements to the level. Iben’s audio sounds really good and adds a lot to the game!

While I had some plans for improving the environment together with Iben, I also ended up spending most of my time on audio, which is a nice change of pace if I’m being honest. Most of my time was spent browsing free sound libraries in the hope of finding some sounds that would match our game and splicing them together to make something I was happy with.

 I left one 3d task open for this week, smoothing out the big walls in the level. I exported all the BSP’s in the level and made a perfectly fitting walls mesh around it, but now with smooth corners and nice-looking plinth, instead of the previous simple cubes with 90 degree angles.

Programming

Since this was the last week of working on our project the programmers spent their time mostly on bug fixing. Of course, since no project is perfect, they had enough work to fill their whole week and more!

Last week Keanu added checkpoints to the game to make the whole experience a bit les repetitive. This did, however, introduce new problems with the way we handle room transitions. Making sounds is not the end of the pipeline for audio since they also needed to be implemented! Some of this can be done from the animation editor, for things like footsteps for example. Most of the important gameplay sounds however, needed to be triggered through code, which can sometimes amount to a lot of work. This meant Keanu wasn’t fully relieved from his audio-related duties.

Nicholas added some much needed screen shake to the game, which makes things like a fat mouse and a mousetrap feel much more impactful and scary. Of course he couldn’t escape the endless rain of bugs that kept coming from the whole team, since everyone spent a lot of time testing the game and, inevitably, breaking it in the process. 

Conclusion

We still spent a lot of hours on our game this last week, but to me it actually felt like a real polish week! All the changes we made were aimed at improving the game, instead of expanding it, which has happened to me in other projects.

We spent Thursday afternoon (and evening for some of us), playtesting the game together and fixing the last bugs. Afterwards, when the final build was done, tested, and uploaded, we all let out a big and happy sigh of relief.  We managed to make a fun and functional project in about eleven weeks and we’re all proud of it. We hope you play and like our game and thank you for reading the devlogs. Goodbye!