Hey everyone!

Welcome back to our weekly devlog. We are making steady progress with our game, finetuning the gameplay systems, while adding some new things.

As we approach the end of our first production sprint, we are starting to see big progress in the way our game look and plays. Let's go over them!

Level Improvements

One of the biggest changes to our game is also one of the most apparent ones. Following feedback we got last week, we focused on making our level look cleaner. Previously, our game had really low shadow quality, so we worked on improving that by baking most of the shadows of the static objects.

Another rather apparent update we made to our level is the addition of textures/materials to the objects placed around our level. The playful nature of the stage already starts to pop out now, as you can see in the image below!

Art and models

We now also have all the models for the possible car mods finished, as you can see in the image below. The battering ram is currently the only one in use in-game, and we will try to bring as many of the others to you as possible, as the more car mods there are in the game, the more diverse and fun gameplay opportunities can be born.

Menu and HUD

Last week, we shared a glimpse of the what the title screen for our game would look like, and this week, we have a little bit more to share on that. We now have the main menu, in-game HUD and end screen ready.

Here you have a look at the end screen of the game, as well as a first draft of the in-game HUD. These aren't final, but the end result will be something along those lines.

For this week's playable build we have a functioning start screen, where players can choose the car model with with Left/Right D-pad, and the color of their car with Up/Down on the D-Pad (the meshes and materials currently used are placeholders, as we are working on them at the moment).

Mechanic improvements

While we unfortunately  don't have any new car mods to share with you, as the player setup screen took up a lot of time of one of the programmers, while the other was hard at work improving the existing mechanics, finetuning the collision so it feels better.

Players now bounce off walls if they drive into them fast enough, making the interaction with the level a lot more fun. Driving along walls will also slow you down, so damage dealt to you increased, and damage you deal is decreased. This is done to discourage players from hugging walls.

The car collision and battering ram collision behaviors have been reworked significantly.  Now the rammed and the hitter matter when players bump into one another, along with the velocity. When a collision occurs, it now knows which car hit the other, and applies the impact more correctly, and when a car that stands still, for example, now gets launched farther than a car that is moving at full speed.

For next week

This week we'll be moving into the first week of the second production sprint, and here are the things we'll be focusing on this week:

• Fixing shadows
• Improving start screen (merging art and code <3)
• Implementing game HUD

This was all for this week, thanks for reading, and see you all back next week!

   - Group 4 Productions