Hello! 

Another week means another Dizzy Deck Devlog!

Following last week's post we entered the polish phase of the project which means no new features! That's why these past 7 days our team was busy enhancing already existing assets and/or adding new, visually appealing ones that don't bring any new game mechanics alongside them.

Art

Enhanced prop textures

To ensure smooth and understandable gameplay we changed some of the existing prop textures to stand out better during gameplay. The biggest example here is the boom barrel now being red.

Metalness and roughness maps

All props now have a corresponding roughness and metalness value to enhance visuals.

Background props for water

The background is now filled with all sorts of props newly made: rainbow and rocks.

Enhancing the water

The shader we used was upgraded, it now has a moving noise texture that resembles sea foam. It also uses a mask to break up the tiling, as well as time-based-opacity to give the effect a more realistic feel.

A simple bubble RFX which further adds life to the sea in the scene.

Sky changes

The color of the sky was adjusted to make it more cohesive with the water.

Mast Trail

A trail indicating the movement of the mast, making it stand out more as well as work better together with the crates which have a similar effect.

Sound

New sound effects we added to the project include: Player Jump, Player Fall and Player Fall into Water. They still need to be integrated into the game though.

UI

Our UI has changed quite a bit so it's now more polished and more coherent with our intro menu.

Code

Fire

The fire related objects were tweaked quite a bit, we added dynamic lights to all fires, made sure dropped torches no longer light lanterns, fixed a lighting issue when all lanterns were out, and finally made sure that held torches no longer instantly kill other players when touching them!

Gif of darkened scene with new screenshake + moving rainbow

UI

Our UI also got some love! When the camera shakes our icons no longer wobble all over the place! We also made sure our pause menu is the top layer so it doesn't get hidden behind our intro screen anymore. The pause menu also does not stay selected after closing anymore, so you cannot close the game on accident anymore because of the hidden menu. The selected button now also grows and shrinks instead of just changing colour, cause with only 2 buttons that was not the clearest indication of which was selected.

Picture of pause menu with Resume selected

Environment

Finally a little script was written that prevents us from having to animate all background items, now they just cruise past in the background and loop around the screen using a simple script. (See gif at fire)

What's Next?

Next week's devlog will be the last Dizzy Deck update before the game is done! Both exciting and stressful for our team, as we still have some polishing to do. What feels great though, is the knowledge that we saw it through to the end and didn't give up even at the dizziest moments. 

Make sure to come back next week to see the final product!