Devlog update:

At this point, much of our core mechanics have been set and we chose to more heavily emphasize polishing what we already had. We added a more interactive map select screen, made sky boxes more interesting, color coded buttons, adjusted the font we used, altered some animations for clarity, added more post-processing, fixed bugs, etc.

In our previous released deliverable, our map select screen was fairly plain. The user (host of the Parsec game) would use their mouse to click on a thumbnail of a map to play it and that was that. In this version, we allow players to actually move their characters on top of the thumbnail of a map to vote. Whichever map has the most votes will be what is played, and if there is a tie, the winner will be randomly selected out of the most voted maps. When players move onto a map thumbnail, it becomes highlighted green to show that it has votes, and is also enlarge slightly. The more votes a map has, the bigger the thumbnail becomes.

Next, we received feedback that the skybox backgrounds we were using were kind of boring. We chose to make them more varied in color and change more dynamically. For instance, we created a map that has a skybox reminiscent of a sunset.

A small touch we added was to color code some of the UI buttons with colors corresponding to the players. The colors don't have any semantic meaning perse, but having them fit the color palette of the players is a nice touch.

Another change we made was to use a new font called Radis Sans. We had a couple reasons for doing so. One reason is that Radis Sans allows the use of lowercase characters and is overall a bit more legible than our previous font, Beon-Regular. Another was that because we transitioned to using clouds as our character and made our game sort of sky-themed, the electro feel of Beon-Regular didn't fit our theme as well whereas Radis Sans did.

We also received feedback that the dash mechanic of players looked to similar to the deadly electric fields that their spawned thunderclouds generated, despite it not actually damaging other players. As a result, we changed its animation into what sort of looks like a rotating fractal / shuriken pattern. We hope this improves clarity with respect to dashing.

Another change we made was to add bloom to our game. Though slight, it is more noticeable on colors with a higher HDR intensity. Most notably, the electric fields that players generate now have a pleasant glow to them that make them feel much more electricity-like. We are making use of Unity's HDRP and so are using a Global Volume on which to apply bloom. An improvement that could be made for the feature might be to use local volumes rather than global, so that we can fine-tune each volume's bloom threshold and intensity for the material it corresponds to. As it is right now, it can be a bit difficult to adjust the intensity of the bloom high enough to make certain materials pop while ensuring that others do not become washed out.

Lastly, we fixed a number of bugs in the game. For instance, there were certain cases where players became stuck on invisible walls on the edges of the map, analytics opt-in caused player deaths to not happen, sometimes players became invisible etc. Overall, this week was again more spent on polishing our already existing material. We hope that we can further iterate in the next few weeks to really drill down on what makes the game fun (and bug free).