Dev Update 5
Kartik: Character Select, Backend Improvements and Bugsmashing
Spring has come and so have my allergies, meaning when I come home from my full day of doing a full time job and a part time job I’m a bit more tired and woozy than normal. In other words, not as much work as I would've liked got done this past week. I did get half of a new feature done however, a character select screen!
Character Select
So in the video you can see two panels that let you choose the character and skin color you want, and then you can see the “composite” cop in the middle. I wanted the character select screen to match the comedic tone of the rest of the game, and reflect the same energy as well. One feature I’m still working on is a little animation that shows the half of a face that has been changed being RIPPED OFF with BLOOD AND GUTS coming out of the seam, and have the new half face slam back onto the head. I think this will match the tone.
You can also see two fists on either bottom corner of the screen, and this is how you confirm the end of character selection: both players press ‘A’ (on xbox) or ‘X’ (on PS4) and the fists slowly close in on the center of the screen, have an epic fist bump, and then we transition to the game state.
As for how character selection actually impacts gameplay, it won’t. Not by much. We have some plans to maybe have character dialogue, and in that situation we might have some more character-building through unique dialogue. Other than that, it will be used to customize the high score board to show the portrait of each player next to their name and score.
Kudos to Garret for making all the art and writing the hilarious bios for each character. We are going to work on the seam at the middle of faces on each side. When Garret made it initially, he didn’t know I was going to show the entire face at any point so the art had a black line going down the middle.
Back end and Bugsmashing
As usual, Eric and I love maintaining good back end practices and decent efficiency in how information is handled. Recently I made some changes to the backend in how the various components on the player (shooting, moving, health, etc) communicate with one another. I also updated how Bullets deal damage to entities to be more generic. This unfortunately broke killing and dying in many ways, and this went more or less unnoticed until I was demo-ing the game to some friends.
Of course.
Either way, I spent some time fixing my mistakes, and now the general flow of code is not only more sensible but also a bit more efficient. Not gonna go into detail because you might fall asleep, I know I did while I was working on this. Not as sexy as adding new features.
