Hello and welcome to the very last update of our game!
We are very excited to finally show you the final result, so here you can find our gameplay trailer:

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But first of all, let's go over the last updates of the polishing sprint:

FX

We tweaked the general sounds of the car a bit, because some of them were too blunt, annoying or monotnme.
We also added more sound effects to the main menu: whenever a player joins, there is a player box being slammed into the background wall, the wall gets cracks visually, but there was no sound for this yet. Now there is! And it sounds satisfying.

Our last particles have been made as well: we have a new death particle, which is in a comic style.
We have a particle that is played during the short boost. They're these white lines that represent the speed of the burst.
Other particles also got their update, such as the item spawner particle.

Right after being knocked off, we have a short 'time out' for the player to recover. But that wasn't really clear yet. So, when being spawned back into the level, your car gets a transparant shader for a short moment. During that time, you can't get hit!

Level Decoration

We have extra decals and props to decorate the scene even more. They give the look of our level that last push.

• Sticky notes all over the level with scribbles and drawings on them.
• Paint splatters! A kid's room is allowed to be a little messy after all.
• A few more background props: a train and a pencil holder are being put on the shelf. 
• To give our pick up truck a little more character, we put lego blocks in the back of the car.
• The colors in the level have been tweaked a bit so they fit more together. Some objects were standing out too much, for example: the yellow marker, the color of it was way too saturated, now, some objects and colors are slightly desaturated.

Mechanics

Our programmers implemented the final elements that the artists made, such as the icons for the pickups. Our mines have some player feedback now as well. When it's active, the lightbulb gets red and also has a small smoke particle effect that comes out of it.

We also implemented screenshakes whenever a car gets in contact with the death zones! this gives a really cool effect, more chaos!

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Post Mortem

We were mostly inspired by games such as Rocket League and Super Smash Bros, these are very popular games, and we essentially set out to take the best aspects of both, and combine them. The result is our game: a car brawler.
There was content that we had to drop due to time constraint, this was because we wanted to focus on getting the core mechanic(s) of our game right: the driving.
A lot of time was spent refining and iterating on the driving and collision behavior of the cars, every week we made changes. As this is the first project of this scale for everyone in our team, some miscalculations in terms of scope were to be expected.
However the final product does have many of the features that we originally planned on adding, and even some new ones that we didn't plan, that were added as development went on, both art- and programming-wise.

We have learned that the best type of feedback comes from diverse sources. We tried to get different people within our target audience to play our game and as a result we got a wide selection of feedback, which we would not have gotten if we have only focused on one specific group within our demographic.

We got acquainted with the blessings and the curses of working with a team. We learned the importance of clear communication, making rules to avoid confusion and complications, and writing things down and always keeping back-ups in case of trouble. This was an approach that helped us out a great many times over the course of making Car Arena Rumble.

Programmers view

In our initial concept, we had envisioned a lot more car abilities, a total of 7 even. Our final product ended up having 3, with 1 of them being repurposed as a stage hazard.
While this might seem like we were initially a bit too optimistic in our planning, we didn't end up cutting too many corners. The car abilities we do have work like they're supposed to, and their implementation went smoothly.

These problems started with having little to no experience with several elements:

-  The UI in Unity: the difficulty was how to set up and display everything.

-   How to set up co-op: The figuring out how to get multiple player to join the game, how to carry players properly across levels, and bind & remove functions when needed.

-   The car movement and the physics. This asked for lots of feedback and research. We learned that starting with a strong foundation and adding details later is definitely the best way to go about these things. It allowed us to keep adding features without needing to tear anything down. What concerns the physics of the car we used a similar style of work, but here the biggest obstacle was recreating ‘realism’. We solved this problem  by creating rules with functionality and fair gameplay in mind.

Artists view

One of the biggest issues was being able to work in the same style, there were some elements we had to tweak in the polishing week because some objects didn't match, either in shape or in color. But this is just a matter of communication between the artists, and a clear preparation at the start of the project.

Us artists have never worked with Unity before. At the start this felt all very chaotic. We are only used to work in Unreal Engine.
It took quite some research and YouTube tutorials how to work with materials, shaders, particles, UI systems, lighting and what not. All of these little things slowed us down a lot in the beginning. Luckily the programmers were there to help us out a bit.

In general, it was really nice to see each others strength points. It happened quite often that we picked up the tasks the other wasn't really great at. At the start, everyone had all sorts of tasks assigned, but during the project, these tasks were slowly divided more, depending on what strength points every artist had.

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Thank you everyone who took the time to go through our progress and devlogs.
It was all in all a fun experience to work on this project. We clearly learned a LOT.
But we can finally say this project has come to an end.

Have fun playing the game!