Harbor Break

Hello everyone, it’s been a while since our last devlog! 

This last period we continued working on all the features we wanted to have finished and tried to get everything done by the given deadline. Given we also had a holiday there was a lot more time to work this time (though we are still expected to stay within our 10 weekly hours).

This week also concludes the first production sprint of our game! If you’ve been following our devlogs, you might know that this project wasn’t the smoothest sail for us. Even so, I am very proud of the whole team for not giving up and facing all the challenges along the way.

 Now that Sprint 1 is over we will be receiving feedback and making our planning for Sprint 2, this will be the final sprint containing new content, followed by a shorter polishing phase. Keep coming back if you're curious about the final product!

Death
One of the features implemented this week was the death plane, it simply deletes objects and players that have fallen under the ocean.

Pause
Another implemented feature is a pause mechanic that freezes the game (maybe you ordered some pizza and need to go open the door while playing). It has a simple menu that allows you to resume or quit.

Win or Lose?
If your boat dies or makes it to the very end, you now get greeted with a menu that lets you try again or quit the game. No more ALT + F4!

Explosions
The explosive barrel also got some changes, it now uses the correct mesh and explodes with a little bit more force. Once exploded, it also despawns after a bit, as to not clutter the boat with debris. It even has a cool explosion effect now!

Ropes
Some player feedback was set up for when you approach the ropes on the ship, though this is currently not visible anywhere in the gameloop.

Player Feedback

RFX

Continuing the player feedback improvements, we have the explosion RFX, which hopefully fits the style of the previous FX done for the game. This is quite a complex effect and was possible to make thanks to this great video.

Since our supervisors didn't like the pulsating red effect for the boat taking damage, I created this simple debris effect which they suggested.

This week it was also the time to look at the lighting in our scene. This is still awaiting feedback and it's expected to change but now our scene is lit less evenly, creating some areas of contrast and helping distinguish different parts of the ship as well.

An outline was also implemented to our new interactable props, to make them stand out more, so players know that they can grab them!