We've reached the end of the first (and second-to-last) week of the polishing phase! As described in previous devlogs, gameplay features have been locked, meaning that the main focus has been exclusively on improving the visuals, feel and experience.

Introduction

Some playtesting among the team showcased that most of the game is where it needs to be. A few rare instances of unintended behaviour appeared at times, but those have been resolved by now. We were able to pinpoint specific areas where the game feel or presentation wasn't necessarily what you'd naturally expect, and have looked at those thoroughly too. Improvements have been made in many areas, the details of which you can find down below!

Art & Design

Just like last week, a healthy mix of gameplay and art related progress:

Level

Gameplay

Some more cover has been added, along with more guard spawns and routes. Here are some examples:

Some stationary guards have been placed across the map too:

Art

Here are screenshots of some of the updated areas:

Main Menu

A new updated version of our main menu! We felt like the main menu has to really show what the game is about and we feel we've captured the game's spirit with this version.

We needed some fun and spicy icons to make the UI and HUD a bit more appealing.

So we made a little alien icon. When the players will load in their controllers, the mouth opens up, showing that player he is ready to go !

Progress Bar:

The bar indicating how many parts have been collected has been updated!

Props

The landscape felt very repetitive and a bit bland, so we made some final additional rock assets to break everything up and get that 'canyon-y' feel in there.

Programming

This week, the focus was mainly on improving some visuals, implementing audio/music, making changes to improve the moment-to-moment play experience and slightly rebalancing aspects of the game which needed some attention.

Power Source

Part Spawners

Previously, UFO part spawners seemed like they didn't really turn off, as their emissive properties would linger even though the light they'd emit turned off. This has been adjusted:

Super Mode

We wanted to re-inforce the feeling of a more chaotic second phase after players had collected all UFO parts and are aiming to return to the UFO. As such, all guards in a radius of the power source now enter "rage" if players are escaping, meaning that they will never give up on chasing you. To counter-act this, we gave the power source a "super" mode in which it has much lower cooldown and looks more powerful.

Quality of life changes

We discovered along the way that we actually liked the effect seen above quite a bit, which is why we added it to the power source default charge. It is also coloured according to the charging player:

This meant that, in super mode, we needed to quickly swap colours back-and-forth in order to be able to keep track of both the charging player but also the super status.

After additional feedback, we also made the probe arrows appear much faster when everybody stands still. Whenever an UFO part is picked up, the probe arrows will also briefly appear in order to keep the flow going.

Controls

The controls for charging the power source and spinning it up have been separated into two inputs. You can find more details at the end of this article, but the gist of it is that charging has been moved to LB while spinning up is still on RB.

An "error" sound has been added if one tries to perform conflicting actions, such as trying to charge while a charge is already on-going, or trying to spin up by yourself while you are charging.

Guards

Particles

Some extra effects have been added to communicate what guards are doing.

Whenever a guard hears something and starts inspecting, a question mark will briefly appear above their head.

If a guard sees a player and sets chase, an exclamation mark will appear above their head. Both of these effects also have some accompanying voicelines.

Players

Feedback

Whenever a player is hit,  extra audiovisual feedback has been added through sounds, controller rumble and a "flash" highlight effect:

Health Ring

Something we noticed while playtesting was that it wasn't always too easy to concentrate on the action in the middle of the screen while also checking, for example, how much health did someone lose from being shot by a guard. As such, we moved the health bars into the playfield by first adjusting the health ring material:

The next step was simply to hook it up to player health:

When a player is alive, the percentage of ring left indicates how much left you have left. When downed, the percentage left indicates how much time is left before you have a "true death".

Audio

This week we implemented a lot of sound effects for most gameplay interactions. This gives players more feedback while they are playing. We also now have music which dynamically changes based on the game state. This means that when the players get detected a high intensity track start playing. If players go back to the undetected state the music switches to a less intense track. This can all be thanks to the sound cue system inside of unreal!

Balance & Other changes

A few changes have been made this week:

• Guard weapon damage changed from 33 to 37.5 on hit
• Power source event range reduced from 3000 units to 2000 units
• Start total time reduced from 8 minutes to 6 minutes
• UFO part bonus time reduced from 2 minutes to 1min30s
• "True death" time penalty reduced from 2 minutes to 1 minute
• Aliens will have a "true death" after being downed for 45 seconds instead of 30
• Aiming with the right-stick does not take other aliens into account anymore
• Power source probe will not be active before the start of the game, or after it has ended
• Guards cannot run sideways when chasing players anymore
• Fixed some issues with guards not properly attacking too closely packed players
• Muzzle flash is aligned better
• If all aliens are downed, the game is over

Conclusion

That is it for this week. We will try to fit in some of our final enhancements over the course of the coming week and then wrap it up there. The current build is now available right here to try out!

This is our updated control scheme:

See you next week for the final devlog!