Week 4 - Presentation and Graphics

Week 4 - Presentation and Graphics

New Features: Dismemberment, Bullet Capacity/Reloading, Early SFX and Music Systems, Main Menu, New Player Character Art

As the semester comes to a close I've been getting real busy with this game trying to experiment with new features and polishing it to be a lot less janky. Our duellists are now able to suffer horrible injuries where if their limbs sustain enough damage they may pop straight off! With this new aspect of the competition, losing your shooting arm can be fatal in the middle of a round. A bullet capacity and reloading system has also been introduced so that periodically you'll have to wait a short time for your gun to reload, so timing when you spam your bullets at your opponent and when you try to move around the level is very important. Along with these gameplay features, music has also been added as well as some early menu concepts. Finally, our combatants are no longer test dummies but actual gentlemen! Here's a gif showing it all in action:

The music that is featured in the game is from an old movie from 1903 called The Great Train Robbery that I couldn't be happier with, it just fits the tone of the high stakes battles featured in this game so well.  

In this week's feedback, there is a point which I plan on addressing in the next update which is that there's not really any indication when you've actually hit someone. Next week I plan on adding SFX and visual wounds so that it's telegraphed a lot more clearly, and later I plan on experimenting with health bars/damage indicators, depending on how much information I want to convey to the duellists. I can also confirm that in the next build the screen resolution and scaling will be fixed so that the UI will no longer have weird issues like they screenshotted below.

Now we're getting into a bit of crunch, and even though I plan on working on this game for a little while longer, I would like to have it feeling generally complete by the end of the semester, and as that date nears closer I am finding the quote "80% of the work on a game goes into the last 10% of it" to be pretty accurate. At the moment a wound system, settings, and proper sound effects and audio are in progress, and if I can manage to iron out all the kinks you should expect to see them all soon. See you next week!