Rise and shine! Release #9. Character Select! news

We're back in full swing now, and you know what that means? There's an awesome new release of Friendship Club!

The groundwork has been laid, the restructuring is almost there. At the beginning of this sprint we wanted to add vertical destructible walls to The Wonky Wagon arena and improve it's procedural generation rules. Half way through implementing them, we realised we'd have to spend more time refactoring the game code to make them work as intended. So...

We switched it up, took out the new walls, and decided to shoot for something different, something more achievable. That something would be the first pass of the Character Select screen! Sophie already mocked it up (see this blog post), and we knew how it was going to work, so here you are, it's in today's build!

(It's only the first pass, keep in mind; we haven't implemented team select, AI players or more than 4 players, but all of that will come in time.)

We'd like to hear your feedback on its usability. Is it annoying to have to go through that screen every time you want to play? Does it make sense? Anything missing?

What else is in this build you ask? Well at last minute, we implemented an "oscillating" game speed mode. This is a speed option that speeds up and slows down the game dynamically over time. As to be expected, we'll be expanding on this mechanic in the future! That's actually it in terms of new features in this release, however Tom & Sophie have been iterating on a lot of UI and concept work, which is awesome, so we're going to show you that too!

Sounds in the character animations.

• Vine 1 - Chud & The Canardinal
• Vine 2 - Old Man Ricketts & Shakey Jake

For the next release we're thinking of implementing the fmod sound engine. We'll have to look at licensing first, but we're super keen on making the audio as juicy as the art. Dynamic music system, sound effects, voices, all the cool things.

That's it! Please send us your feedback so we can take it on board. Hope you enjoy this release.

- Ashley

Full changelog:

22nd September - 17th October
Wow that's a long one!

New Features:

• Character select!
• Oscillating game speed setting.
• Paintings fall off the walls in Timmy's Bedroom.

Art & Animations:

• Headless character idle/run animations for character select.
• Headless character "picking up head" animations for character select. One for each character!
• Uniform avatar boxes for the corners. This is needed so players can be placed in any corner.

Audio:

• Headless character gibberish screaming.
• Headless character smooth jazz voices.
• Character select audio. Drum loops, jazz bass samples.

Code Refactoring:

• Refactored game modes into list of Modifiers.
• Refactored in-game state into Arena, Arena Grid, Arena Line Manager.
• Refactored Player into Agent, Player, Enemy ready for "Nana Ricketts" implementation.

Other things you won't see in the game yet but are still sort of cool to talk about:

• Code: Made Nana Ricketts more "human" in her firing behaviour. She now targets the two closest players.
• Code: Fixed bug where vases weren't on sidetables. (This was introduced by the refactoring...)
• Code: Fixed bug where reticule would go through breakable walls. (This was introduced by the refactoring too...)
• Art: Vertical breakable walls.
• Animation: New design of Quickdraw countdown timer.
• Audio: Saloon music slightly remixed.
• Misc: No longer using Mural.ly because the free plans are gone and it costs way too much.
• Misc: Printed a bunch of stuff for an actual physical mood board.
• Misc: Moved project roadmap to Google Drive document.