Art Part:

visual effects/realtime FX:

Like we said the last time most of the models are done and the big focus of this week is the visual effect. We still have a lot of visual effects to do but we already have some of the most important ones.

The first one was the ship particles! This will already give a better feeling when the ship is flying around. As you can see we made two different particles for the thruster. It's just because we need one without a boost and the other with a boost. I also added those trails because I thought that just making the thruster longer and faster was not enough to make a difference between them. Now it's like there is friction with the wind like a plane has.

We'll need multiple explosion but the most important one was the missile explosion. This already give some player feedback when a missile touch something. We wanted the explosion to be fast because otherwise the player wouldn't see it.

Pick-Up Particles:

For the pick-ups we needed to make some particles so they would catch the players attention. And make it clear that the player can pick these up and gives him the 'upgrades' that the pick-up gives.

Audiance:

For the audience we decided to make it simple with a sprite sheet. We made one for the standing cheering audience and one for the sitting cheering audience.

Last week we had the seats for the lower class audience ready and now we also have the seats for the highe class and presentors.
These seats are higher up in the cave, with shield walls all around. Giving the people have great vision of the fight that is going on. These seats are also more private. Great for the gamblers amoung the higher class that want to watch every single detail.

UI & Main Menu:

We already fully designed the entire main menu but we still have to implement it in game. The design of the main menu is inspired by some sci fi games such like halo/ ratchet and clank. We really wanted something "Arcady" but also very clean and I must say it. I am really happy proud of the result. hopefully you like it too! I wanted the design of every interface to be very consistent. that's why a design the buttons first and design the adapt the design of everything else to the button design.

This is the final look of the main menu when you'll start the game. The background is still a placeholder. We wanted to make a custom design for the background But we are not sure yet. The first idea was to make a video but we don't want to make the background too distracting. That's something we'll change in the coming week or in the polishing phase.

Light update:

We made a small change and made it less darker in the arena. We also tried to already lower some of the performance for the light but we still have some work to do for lowering the performance.

Programming:

Pickups:

We implemented multiple pickups in the game, 1 that replenishes your missile ammo, 1 that restores hp, and 1 that upgrades your ship's guns. The ship upgrades only make you shoot more for now, and you can only upgrade once. We didn't add a damage increase yet. the enemies also don't drop the pickups yet.