Devlog 8: Almost there

Welcome back everyone to our 8th devlog. Things keep progressing smoothly and we're well on our way to a finished game.

A lot of progress has happened from gameplay to visueals and UI development.

So lets get right into it~!

VISUALS

Our visuals keep updating, from added plants, to new structures and updated lighting.

We felt the game was a litle too light, so to update the mystery feel of the game we made the scene just a tad bit darker, adding a little more vignet and some light changes to the characters.

To indocate where your characters is, you're light now actively updates when moving closer to the altar.

We also added the altar structure, giving some visual clarity and adding interest to the scene. scattering bloodspats all around to add to the gore factor. This is also a good visual for seeing our updated visuals.

FEATURES

This week, we continued integrating more sprites into the game, focusing specifically on the player characters. We're happy to report that sprites for both players are now implemented, along with most of their core animations. 

A particular highlight is the new visual cue that clearly shows when you're carrying a baby – it turned out really cute! In addition to character art, the Health Bar UI is now also functional in-game. These bars dynamically update to reflect the player's current health, visually changing between full, half-damaged, and empty states.

We made dead player bodies pickupable just like our babies, this was needed for our revive mechanic. Now you can pick up fallen ally and bring him to the altar to be sacrificed and revived. The actual reviving wasn't to hard to program, more time went in changing bits of code everywhere so players could be pickedup. Next we replaced the temporary UI elements with the newly made assets. For some elements that was done in a few clicks, for others it took a while to tweak the positions to make it look right. Additionally we made a minimap, getting the players and the altar to display correctly was straightforward but to get all the babies on the minimap(without hardcoding each one) was quite a challenge.

SPRITES

This week we updated our baby sprites. We discovered that the previous sprites don't match with the rest of the game and this was because they were rendered with the same quality of the enemies, who are bigger and thus the baby sprites had more detail then needed.

RFX

With finishing the sprites we were also able to start working on the RFX, to keep it consistent with the style we have now we made a material that converts our textures inside unreal to a sprite, with both levels and texture density. We can also upload un-pixelated textures and convert them this way extremely easy.

With this we started working on the rfx for multiple things. Which you can see next week implemented properly ;)

UI 

We finalized all the elements needed in the heads up display and displayed them all together in an example frame. The elements we made this week, are the compass, timer and controls icon. We then started working on the different menu screens that are going to be in the game. The first one being the controls menu since we though this was the most important one to be able to play the game. We then continued by making the start and game over screen, and we are currently working on the design of the victory screen.

AUDIO

The last thing we added this week was a bunch of audio, adding footsteps based on what you're stepping on. updated soundtack and sound when striking an enemy.

But thats it for this week guys, i hope you enjoyed this once again and i hope to see you next week.

The SacriFetus team