We made it.  After 3 months of hard work, we finished Extendo-Brawl! 

Gameplay

This week, the programmers implemented the final sounds and particles. After some feedback, they also adjusted the aim visual,  now the line will always reach the target no matter the distance, which wasn't the case before. Additionally, they implemented some of the new visuals for the start screen and HUD.  Of course, they also did some bug fixes to for example the laser, end screen,  animations and many other things. 

But the most notable enhancement in gameplay was done to the wooden box throwing. Now, when a player throws a box, it won't collide with themselves anymore for a second. This guarantees that you don't get bounced away instantly if you hit yourself with that box in that time period. This also makes throwing a box while you stand on top of it completely accurate, which wasn't the case before because of the physics while you stand on the box. 

Art

As artists we wanted to make everything look as good as possible before calling the game done.
So we didn't really add any more props, particles etc. as we had more than enough already, but polished the ones we had where needed.

One major visual change we made was redesigning our main menu and end screen.
We decided to use another font and edited the logo and buttons so they would fit better with our 3D style.

Also the composition of the main menu and control scheme got polished to look as good as possible.

Besides that we also added some more post processing like the black outline and fog.
The level now also has a more appealing background. We added godrays, the clouds have a pink-ish color to give a better mood and
there are even space ships flying around.

All of these changes took our game to another level. We are very happy with how it turned out.

Final words

Throughout the project we learned a lot of things. We were very ambitious and while that's a good thing, maybe we were a bit too ambitious at times. We wanted to create a big project, with tons of rooms, kinds of boxes and cool scoring/respawn systems. So for our next project, we will try to focus more on the important and base mechanics, instead of trying to think of more gameplay features while our main mechanics aren't even fully implemented.

Communication wasn't always our strongest suit. We had some really good weeks where everything went smoothly, but also some really bad ones where we didn't talk as much as we should have. We definitely learned that we should prioritize good communication because it helps with the overall workflow and can be the reason why a project fails or succeeds.

The programmers learned to work with some new things in Unity, like some HUD and animation features. In terms of code, we learned that we should separate more of our scripts to give each script a clear purpose. We faced a lot of bugs, Unity specific, but also code related. This made us more competent in problem-solving than at the start of the project.

The artists learned to work with Unity and Perforce, software they hadn't used before.  In terms of art, they learned the value of streamlining their pipeline when it comes to designing, modeling and texturing. We quickly found each of us had different fields of expertise, and we used this to our advantage. At no point did we have to skip an important part of the pipeline because of a lack of ability or inability to learn. Moreover, we made sure we applied the artistic principles as laid out by our artbible and stuck to them for the most part. Even though we had some different tastes, habits and ambitions, when it came to it we managed to arrive at a consistent look.

 Surprisingly, it was when it came to level design, we had the most issues. We fumbled the layout of the game a number of times - not helped by having to downsize more than once - resulting in some frustration. In the end, we came up with something much simpler than we originally intended, however, we wanted to deliver a product that plays well, as we found this the most important part of the equation.

We were unaware of everything that goes into the whole creation of the game before we started the project. After completing this project, we have a better understanding of how game development is done, not just in terms of arts, programming, and sound, but also in terms of task distribution, time management, and effective resource utilization. We're proud of the end result and we hope you guys will find as much joy in our game as we do.

Thank you for joining us in this adventure and hopefully, our paths will cross again someday!

for the final time.

-The Extendo-Brawl team