Hey everyone! Sprint 2 is in full swing, and we’re making some awesome progress. We’re focusing on tightening up the core gameplay, polishing features, and refining our visuals. Here’s a quick update on what’s new and what’s coming next!

Features
Some of the features worked on this week include Player Health and Boat Tilting.

Player Health
That's right, you can now be hurt as an individual! And yes it can kill you! In our current build there is no way to light yourself on fire or take damage directly yet, though that will be implemented shortly after this week. Though for now you'll have to trust my word, the player can visually burn and has a healthbar that shows up for a short time after taking damage.

Boat Tilting
This got slightly redone to now be based on level progress instead of boat health. The values also got tweaked to be a less extreme experience alltogether.

Explosive Barrel
During our busy sprints somewhere along the way both the model and functionality of our BoomBarrel went missing! Luckily we could use our version control to retrieve that with moderate ease.

Visuals

Boat model

The boat model could use some detail. We had to take into account that the details shouldn't obstruct player area and play ability. This was no easy feat but the results pay  off!

Old vs new model

Boat textures 

Gradients needed to be added to the boat which was planned for this sprint. The goal was to keep a somewhat realistically colored greek boat as well as keep our desired artstyle and color palette. 

Old vs new colors 

Updated Props

The materials of the props have been updated to align more with our art style. The goal is to make sure every asset feels cohesive and supports the overall visual direction of the game.

Scene Lighting

After the feedback from our supervisors, the lighting was reevaluated, deleting unnecessary light sources and keeping only the fill light for the back of the boat. To compensate for that and add some visual interest to the player area, we added one more directional light which drives the clouds shadows on the deck of the ship as well as has a nice, yellowish hue. 

We also made sure to make the lighting in the scene dynamic and respond to the events inside the game. Now, when a fire of torch on the ship goes out, the scene will get gradually darker!

RFX

The RFX spree continues ✨This week it was the time to add some effects to the water/oil barrels, making sure that there is some visual indication of them being dropped on the ground. Here is the final result we managed to achieve this week:

(This might still needs some tweaks since at the moment the splash goes up quite high) The effect consists of multiple smaller effects:

a splash which is achieved by scaling a textured cone on the Y axis

droplets shooting upwards

simple foam

ripples on the ground

Apart from that, the previously added effect of boat taking damage was reevaluated and we decided to drop it for now, as the supervisors didn't like it. We might want to shift towards different kinds of player feedback for the ship damage, not focusing solely on visual effects but exploring other options - sound effects, controller shake etc.

Multiplayer

As our game is a couch co-op multiplayer game it was time to implement the multiplayer system. So now we have a good multiplayer system where players can join the game. Each player has their own spawnpoint and using this system, we can add revive mechanics or other easily.

Oil

For one of the events players will need to bring oil to the mast. Oil on a ship filled with torches is quite dangerous though. So players will need to watch out with their torches and oil barrels. If the barrel is dropped an oil spill will appear on the ship. Then if a torch falls onto that oil spill it will catch on fire. Which in turn can put players on fire if they walk into it.

Oil spill on fire

Implementing the new boat model

With the new boat model came the opportunity to optimize the colliders. Before we used a simple mesh collider which while easy to apply is not performant and can cause a bunch of physics issues. This is why we took the time to make sure that all colliders are primitives.

What's on the horizon?

Dizzy Deck's crew will focus on improving the game's core functionalities even further, ensuring what we have in the game runs smoothly. It's also high time we added sounds to the game so hopefully by the next devlog you will hear music in the background of our gameplay! 🌊