Devlog 9: Final sprint

Welcome back everyone to our 9th devlog. Things keep progressing smoothly and we're well on our way to a finished game.

This week is the last production week, next week we're going into polish and we can add the finishing touches to our game!

This week we went all in on those final details and adding sound

So lets get right into it~!

Programming Dev Update: AI Enhancements 

This week brought advancements to the AI behind Sacrifetus, enhancing both our precious babies and the enemies players will face. 

Baby AI Comes Alive:

 We've given the baby characters more autonomy! They now curiously wander around their spawn area. Crucially, if a player carries a baby far away and drops it, the baby's AI will kick back in, prompting it to crawl back towards its starting point. This system pauses the AI while the baby is held and resumes it upon release. As babies are the heart of Sacrifetus, this dynamic behavior makes them feel much more like living parts of the world. 

New Threats Emerge: 

To keep players on their toes, we've added two specialized enemy variants: 

The Fast Enemy: A smaller, nimbler foe that's better at closing the distance quickly, though it can't take much punishment. 

The Tank Enemy: This hulking enemy is slower but packs a serious punch (dealing double damage!) and has high health, requiring 4 hits to overcome. These new enemies will appear less frequently than standard types, integrated into spawn waves to have greater depth and challenge into combat. 

Camera update:

The camera now sweeps in a nice motion when switching between one and two player view instead of the instant cut it did beforehand. Unreal does have inbuilt functionality for this.To use this we had to change from using camera components to camera actors which took longer than expected.

Sacrificing:

When in range to sacrifice a baby or a fellow player there is now a popup prompt showing when and how you can sacrifice. It also has a progress bar to see how far along the button mashing you are. 

Victory Screen Stats:

We've added individual stats to the victory screen, you will now be able to boast about your superior performance. You can see who spent more time alive, who made more kills and finally who made more sacrifices.

Shifting Gears: 

Sprint End & Polish Phase:

This week concludes our current feature-focused sprint. While new feature development is now on hold, we're diving headfirst into a dedicated two-week polish phase. Our goal is to refine existing mechanics, squash bugs, and ensure the entire gameplay experience feels smooth and satisfying.

Audio

for audio we dont have a lot to show in screenshots and videos are a bit large for itch. but we've improved a bunch. having updated ambience with increasing intensity. start and end music. soundeffects and much more!

UI

In this last week, we also updated our UI elements. We started by changing all the colors so they fit more with the game. We then changed the size of buttons, HUD elements and titles. We also tried solving some pixel inconsistencies. Lastly we updated any unclear elements, for example we added a second row of buttons by the controller so it's more clear that the attack button is the trigger button and not the shoulder button.

Sprite update:

We found out that some of the sprites had a issue where they were cut off during the sprite conversion. Luckily this was fixed so they can be the first thing that has been polished for this upcoming sprint!

RFX:

The RFX has been going strong this week as well! While we dont want to show you everything we have been working on have a little sneakpeek of the particles that will appear when you are sacrificing a baby ;)

But thats all for today folks, this has been a bumpy rightbut we're making it in the end.

I thank you all again for joining us and see you next week!

The SacriFetus team~!