Hey guys! 

I hope everyone is doing fine this week? I unfortunately felt a bit sick but that didn't stop me and my team members for rocking this week.

It's an important week as it's the ending of our first development sprint and there had to be a fun playable build ready.  Not everyone went smoothly last week as we still missed a large part of what would make our game fun. So that was our main concern this week, and we managed to create something that already feels way more fun and chaotic to play.

As a first we needed to actually have some obstacles and hazards in our level. We started out by refining the way our patches of tall grass work. We made the player unable to jump out of the slowing grass so it was more threatening to move through there or get pushed in. Another thing that now works better are the boulders. They add a more impactfull knockback to the player, making them more focussed on dodging than just running against them and not caring. Another obstacle that made it are the moving walls that can knock aside players but also block parts of the track and force players to choose a different path.

We also finally implemented our player dying and respawning as a ghost that as of now just has a milder push than the player. This gives him the ability to still play but not win the game.  All this combined with working animations and some sounds added a bit of player feedback already making the game generally more enjoyable.

Another really big impact in our game are the pickups. The once that are quasi done implementation wise are a fast dash pickup that can be used to catch up, dodge or reach a pickup faster. A grappling hook to get close to a player real fast, a bear trap that you leave behind and can stun anyone running into it, and a short range freeze ray that freezes the hit player for a reasonable long time.

All of this didn't come with a couple of struggles that we had to overcome to make the experience more fair and fun. 1 of the issues we had was that when jumping and someone used their push ability you would be launched away pretty hard. We did not come up or find a nice air restitution way to lessen this or did not want to reimplement the whole push for now(might in the future) so we fixed it by placing a collision mesh a bit above the jumpable terrain.  This blocks the player from being launched of terrain or screen.

Another one we found very annoying is hitting our grappling hook and freeze ray, as even if the ray displayed a hit it didn't seem to affect the hit target. After searching for a bit we noticed we didn't take into account we could hit ourselves, so we flagged the owner of the pickup to not get hit.

Art  wise we implemented a couple more hamster color patterns and more animations.

In our next sprint we will add way more player feedback, a couple more pickups and hazards, visual hint of pickups on the player,  a main menu hub level and an actual win condition.

Cya next time !

PS: We encountered some build problems due to some missing link files, so we sadly can't package our project for you to test. We'll work to solve this as soon as possible and post the playable build for you to enjoy!