Introduction:

Well ladies and gentlemen, and those in between, we've reached the final week of polishing. Our game has reached a finished stage, no matter what we might want to add or improve upon, it is finished. It strange to now know that I won't need to worry or work on this after tomorrow, when we will present our game in front of a jury made up of moderators for this course.  It actually makes me a bit sad.

Working on this type of project has been a small dream come true for me, working together in a team of peers to create a video game that people can have playing with friends and strengthen bonds together. This has always been a personal reason as to why I want  to create video games and to finally being able to work and finish such a project. To not sound cheesy but this really has been a dream come true for me. I hope my teammates took as much out of this as I have done.

Even the small hickups along the way have now become nothing more than pleasant memories, that I can reminisce upon once I've survived the coming exam period (ugh, yeah that's still a thing that's happening). 

For this weeks log, I will be going over the final adjustments that have been made to the game and some work that we have done outside of the game to prepare for final build and release of the game. You may have noticed these changes already based on the page that you are reading right now or the initial main page where you could download the final build. 

Art Section:

Our artists worked hard on adding the final visuals to our game, preparing for the final build. Anything that looked weird, they busied themselves with fixing it. mostly centered around the UI of the game which you certainly must have noticed while playing the final build of the game. This part was mostly taken up by Tommy's work, who pulled up his sleeves and got to completing a final herculean trial to finish everything for us.

One of these tasks was making the final pass for the important UI screens, the main menu screen and the game info screen, making it more readable and in general more pleasant to look at. Adding that little spirit and fancies of our game to these screens to make them fit with the theme of the game we've created. Though these screens are immediately available at boot up,  here they are below none the less.

Sadly for the release, some sacrifices had to be make in terms of the screen. For the sake of cpyright infiringement. This sacrifice hurt me deepest. It's a loss that this project can't recover from but this loss was necessary, to ensure that our uni won't have any legal issues with displaying our game. So as little behind-the-scene secret, the menus used to have this little picture hiding within them.

I'm mentioning this because otherwise the world will forever forget that this existed. 

Anyhow, along with this, Tommy worked hard on developing the visuals for the traps we have within the game. Finally we can move on from those infernal png's to something much more presentable, and hopefully a visual way for you to tell what exactly every trap is capable of within the level. 

Meanwhile, our resident technical artist, Matteo, had dipped his toes in a little bit of video editing in order to create the wonderful trailer for our game that you can see within the main itch.io page. Hyping up anyone who might've been on the fence to play our game, to finally get a pair and three more friends to play the game. I can't talk too much about it so I'll trust the wonderful writing advice of 'show, don't tell' by giving YOU the advice to, if you haven't seen it, to close this devlog and go watch it.

Programming Section:

Over on the programming end of the world, we've settled on finishing off the final few bugs that we're still present, and most importantly that we have been aware off ourselves. Of course, you bet there's somewhere some funkiness happening that for some stupid miracle hadn't reared its head up during production, all we can hope is that it isn't something too game breaking.

I'm kind of now in trouble since there isn't much to talk about, or well anything that's really interesting. it was just some bug fixes so small and stupid that they are pretty much a snore or cleaning up the itch.io and creating our final presentation to use tomorrow. 

I could tell you about the humorous bug we called the 'Michael Jackson Bug' for the reason that they made the guards move leaned to the front in the map when they got rapidly caught in two traps, in short succession. It took a while to fix it, since we had to unpack some physics code that we had written before. For instance, one fix fired back so spectacularly that it caused the guard to get constantly launched outside of the level. We did manage to finally fix ( some problems with the coroutines ) but it was rather funny.

The other one was some artifacting problems caused at the start of the round that made the screen momentarily freak out, as far as I'm aware we managed to make it appear less often then it used but I would still advise not too freak out too much if you see a weird visual bug in your first round. The rounds afterwards should run buttery smooth.

Then there was a few adjustments of the spawn points that for some reason we're spawning some objects in very strange manners, such as painting literally piercing through the wall or blending perfectly together into some very weird texture overlap.

Honestly, that was about it. Of course there was so much that we could have done to improve this entire project but honestly it were all thing that would have definitely taken us more than a week to implement which is honestly just time that none us had to spare. So that's why this devlog might feel so lackluster compared to the others, we were mostly preparing for the final hand-in more so than the game's final version, and personally, I'm rather pleased with the rsult that we already have.

So please, now with this final build, find some friends, find 4 Xbox controllers and have small gaming session trying out our game along with all the other games made for the DAE Game Jam. All the groups worked hard bringing out a presentable and fun product for you, so please look at what the future generation of game developers have made (taking into account that these are all prototypes for possible complete games and should be taken as such).