Hi everyone!

Been a while since our last devlog, but that also means we were able to bring you a bigger update. We reached the end of actual development which means we wont be adding more features to the game BUT we will really bring the game to the next level over the next weeks of polishing.

First ill tell you a bit about the things we changed and ended up adding.

 Our ghosts felt a bit bland before and boring to actually still play cause you did not really have a goal, but that's totally different now. If you die as a normal player you'll turn into a rapid moving ghost that gradually fades away and vanishes from existence.. but this is avoidable by draining away life essence from remaining alive players by phasing in their neighbourhood. Gaining enough of their essence brings the ghost back to life.

Secondly we added a cool starting zone acting as our level main menu where players can play around and test different pickups. If a player stands in the starting zone a timer will countdown the transitioning to actual game as long someone is in the start trigger zone.

Another change we made was to our freeze ray, being that it's now a cone of freezing to make it more intuitive to hit and more original than just 1 straight beam. The cone now freezes you and to break out you have to wiggle your joystick around a couple of times rapidly.

Art wise our level looks way more complete now and we finally also have a separate model and material that fits the ghost. Beside the level is beautifully filled with trees, rocks , rivers and grass patches.

Here a nice set of ambient gifs and pictures:

Look at these cuties

During the last weeks of development we of course also encountered a couple of issues we had to solve.

First of all our ghost got blocked by a lot of objects it should not be blocked by and could also fall out / of the map. This took a bit of time to fix as we needed to put collision meshes everywhere we wanted to block off the ghost. Then we had to give them custom collision so they only block of the ghost. Then as a last step we needed to dynamically setup the collision of the player / ghost so the walls knew if the player was in it's ghost state or not.

Another problem we noticed people telling us about was that they did not have a clue about what pickup they had. This was a relatively easy problem to solve as we just made a display object that spins the current pickup around the player.

The final problem we heard about quite often was that our ghost looked very similar to an existing hamster, so our artist gave him a new look:

So you might wonder what we will be doing the upcoming weeks?

Well first of all art wise it will be mostly particles and other vfx to add more player feedback and flair. Then secondly we will refine the existing behaviour, make it bugfree, more intuitive,.. After that we need that add sound effects too. Generally more player feedback will be introduced.

I hope you are all still as hyped as we are to see the final result of our game!

Cheers and see you next week.