#bemytwincop

Kartik: Recent Accolade, Updated Main Menu, Player Abilities, Fine Details

First of all, we won an award!!

We won the Best Student Game award at IndieBits 2017. We are super proud and very excited about this achievement and hope to continue to take this game to other local shows to gain more recognition.

This update might be a bit short due to how busy this week is (and last few weeks have been), in spite of the significant progress that has been made.

Update Main Menu

One immediate change you’ll notice about the game is the update main menu. The previous main menu had been feeling very “dead” to me, nothing about it felt alive and the design didn’t match the energy and excitement of the game. Take a look at the new main menu:

The design is by no means final, but it is far more in line with the aesthetic of the game and feels much more alive. In the video attached at the bottom you can see how the elements are animated and breathe life into the previously dead menu.

I have plans to make the text a bit more readable and to improve on the visual of the icons along the side for more clarity but those are on the back burner until other work is completed.

Player Abilities

One major critique we received from one of our recent playtests was that there is no compelling reason to choose specific characters from the main menu. Our solution: player abilities. Each character is going to have a unique ability that adds significant flavor to the gameplay. The two abilities we have completed thus far are Power Punch and Grappling Hook (names subject to change)

These abilities are activated by the left trigger (giving symmetrical controls on the controller) and have a set number of “Charges”. See the UI below:

Each time one player uses their ability, the other player’s charges are refilled by one. That, and Twinsanity, are the only ways to refill your charges for your ability. This goes hand in hand with the cooperative gameplay that is already well established in the game, and we hope it works for players as well as it works for us.

These abilities are going to be used mostly for crowd control and strategic maneuvers, though balancing their usefulness is certainly going to be a huge challenge. None of these abilities are going to do a whole lot of a damage, their primary usage will be to move/stun/relocate enemies around the map to make them easier to kill.

We can control the maximum number of charges an ability might hold and plan on using that as a balancing tool and a gameplay tool to encourage various play styles. We hope that the other ability ideas we come up with will be equally fun and engaging to use, and that each one will have an interesting play style with another.

Fine Details

As usual, a slew of smaller changes were made (bug fixes, tweaks, other miscellanea) that don’t deserve their own category so here they are in a concise list:

Bringing attention to the wave instructions: A lot of people seemed to miss the small bit of UI on the top left corner of the screen that showed you how many enemies you have to kill, or what the special instructions for a wave were. Now, a small animation pops the UI close to the center of the screen and brings attention to itself before it pops back into its position

Wave end communication: Some players were confused about whether or not they’d defeated all the enemies since the only communication that a wave was finished was the UI that indicated the beginning of the next wave. Now there is a flashy animation that indicates that you have successfully cleared a wave, not only rewarding the player more but also better communicating their success.

Sleep frames: This is something that we have been struggling for a while with. We wanted to be able to momentarily freeze the game on important moments like hooking an enemy or landing a huge hit (a lesson learned from Jan Willem Nijman’s excellent “Art of the Screenshake”) and we finally managed to get it to work mostly bug free.

Improved loading logic: Previously, the game would have a variety of issues related to loading and these have mostly been dealt with

Balance: regular shooting enemies move a bit faster and are a bit more squishy, rocket dudes are more tanky.

Polish: Cans now explode into a puddle of soda, layering of enemies and bullets and environment has been improved, Twinsanity auto-disables at important moments to prevent awkward slow-motion.

That concludes this Development Update, thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more fun announcements and even more content!

Kartik: Player Dialogue, Improved Communication, Boss Polish, Procedural Blood, and Bugsmashing (as usual)

Don’t worry, I know we went one week without an update. Maybe that was because we’d been working on this for 5 weeks straight on top of our other jobs and obligations and felt tired. I don’t know, just throwing it out there.

Player Dialogue

One of the biggest changes between the previous update and this one is that there is now a system in place for player dialogue options. Just like everything else in the game, this is (intentionally) awkwardly controlled by both players. One (randomly selected) player gets to choose the first half of the response sentence and the other player chooses the other half. This leads to some sentences not quite coming out the way TwinCop may intend.

You can see that the UI even reflects which “side” of TwinCop is speaking. There is a timer at the bottom right corner of the panel to encourage quick responses and reduce dialogue fatigue (I hate it when dialogue cutscenes take unnecessarily long in games... hint: you can press “Start” to skip all dialogue in our game!)

Developing this system came with its own slew of challenges, for instance handling the wide range of responses. There is a total of 10 possible responses; 3x3 combinations of options, or the 10th option: being silent. Eventually it is my goal to have a written response for each dialogue option (the system allows us to easily add whatever dialogue responses we want). We can add a lot of comedic value through this dialogue system and I look forward to seeing how this is fully utilized.

Improved Communication

One of the most common bits of feedback we’ve been receiving is that it is sometimes hard to tell which way the players are trying to move. Since the indicators are only two small triangles that turn white when they overlap, it can be difficult to stay in sync.

The new visual does two important things: it drastically increases the visibility of these direction indicators and helps the player be able to tell which indicator is theirs even when aligned. The former is achieved through (obviously) making the colors more vibrant and adding colored rings around the player. The latter is achieved by offsetting the triangle positions such that even when they overlap and become white (an important part of indicating that the player is healing and charging twinsanity) you still know which triangle is yours.

Boss Polish

Watch the video attached at the end of this post if you want to see what I did. Basically we had been missing some audio during the boss introduction, and the boss kinda just disappeared when it died. I made a short track to play while the boss is transforming, and started the music right when the name appears. I am still planning on improving the visual for the name reveal however.

When the boss dies, it now has a prolonged explosion followed by cheesy light beams that erupt from within. It feels far more satisfying to defeat, and the sound effects (very slowed down and pitch-shifted gunshot sounds) make it feel that much more epic.

Procedural Blood

Up until recently I’d been spawning small blood splat sprites I’d made every time an enemy got shot. I was growing tired of seeing the same blood sprite over and over again, especially when some of them wouldn’t always appear where I expected them to. I decided to try to make a new system for making blood decals and am now using a particle system to paint the blood splat onto the decal layer.

All I did was switch the layer of the particle system to the decal layer (see one of the earlier dev blogs to see how I’m doing the permanent decal system) and tell the decal system to render the particles shortly after they’re created. What that creates is a blood splat shape that actually resembles how and where an enemy was shot. I already had this blood particle system working, so utilizing it with the decal system should’ve been a no-brainer. I’m much happier with how the blood naturally fills the play space now.

That was a dark and gruesome thing to say. Moving on~

Bugsmashing

Due to the plethora of bugs we fixed this past week, let me just list them with minor details so you can see the madness we’ve been dealing with:

Our system for initiating TwinSanity had up until now been requiring players to both press “A” on the EXACT SAME FRAME. No idea how we didn’t notice this until now.

Sometimes when enemies died, their death would count as 2 deaths instead of 1, throwing off the entire wave system

Blood started spawning on the wrong layer, causing lots of z-fighting

Explosions during the boss fight would randomly freeze from time to time

Rockets were being rendered in front of UI

One of the skin color options on the main menu got set to a VERY sickly yellow on accident

Layering for the PopTop machine got broken when we updated to Unity 5.6 (praise the new layering system)

More minute frustrations that were buggin’ up the system.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading and also get a life what are you doing reading this go outside make some friends. Or watch the play through of the latest content here. Your choice.

Thank you,