Week 19 - Light at the end of the metaphorical tunnel...

Hey everyone, and welcome to (finally) another productive week of 'Just Survive: Arena' development blog. This week was a very good week for me. Not only did I manage to sort out the z-layering issue, but I also managed to add a few more aesthetic effects to the game level, as well as ironing out some kinks with the trap "formula".
So to start off, I FINALLY managed to sort out the Z-layering issue that I had last week (second times the charm). Without going in to too much detail or programmer speak, I basically failed to call the correct actors at the start of every update, leading to null objects. But, after a few hours to rigorous (and tedious) testing, I had managed to flesh the problems out and correct them. Bottom line is; it's working. Yay!

The next thing I had to correct was timing and spacing involved with each of the traps. Before it felt a little too fast and didn't really "ease" the player in to playing the game and understanding it. To fix it, I basically slowed down the timing of each trap trigger, and doing so made the game-play fell a lot more comfortable. Still, I would probably tweak this further down the track during Beta testing, but at the moment it's feeling pretty good.

Now the real fun part, I had enough time to implement some aesthetic changes / additions to the game level to make it a bit more "poppy" and animated. I added a bit more saturation to the game's background so it didn't feel washed out. I also added an animated crowd to the outside to make it feel more lively. I'll probably add a few more effects to the game-play later down the track such as streamers, or the crowd throwing rotten tomatoes. Let me know what you think!

You probably noticed that the video speeds up randomly. Yeah, I'm not sure why. I think it was something to do with the recording.

Another really short development blog this week. Next week I'm hoping to not only finalise the power-ups/Pick-ups, but also implement the final scoring system after your character dies. Once that is done, I'll then focus on the main menu screen, the options page, and the credits screen. Yes! I can see the light at the end of the metaphorical tunnel!

Lets hope things stay on track this time!

Until next week,

​Thanks for reading!