Spliced Beta Update news

What's New

1. Splicing Animation (Between Character Selection and the Rounds)
2. Gameplay Loop Changed: Random teams each round and a player's individual wins are kept track of
3. Updated Main-Menu
4. Hooke's Law on Hit
5. Enter Portal to select character
6. Better Player Guidance on the Character Selection Screen

What's the Motivation

1. Before this week, we just threw together the teams without any animation showing the process. Many players were confused the first time they played our game as they did not know that they were merged together. So we added an animation to try to clear up some confusion about the players only controlling one part of a body. We also used the same animation to show the randomized teams that are made in between each round.
2. We changed the gameplay loop to allow the players to experience playing both the torsos and legs that they picked. Each round, the players are randomly assigned as a torso or legs on a random team. The two players on the winning team in each round receive a point. The first player to get to 3 points is the winner. We also removed the 1v1 round between the winners because it was not enjoyable for the losing team to not play.
3. We updated the Main-Menu because it was very simple. Now it shows the modes that we will have in the official release. The only mode that works right now is 4-player. We have all the code for a 2-player mode but it was not completely ready this week.
4. Hooke's Law is used when a player is hit to add some more juice. The player gets a little bigger and then returns to its original size.
5. Players just have to enter the portal in character selection to select their character now. We also added an animation where the player gets sucked into the portal and disappears. Jumping up to the portal and then pressing Start in the previous iterations did not make sense as the player already had to perform action to get up to the portal to select their character.
6. The character selection now rotates through the controls, which we standardized this week. All legs now only use the left stick and the A button. We also added a crossbow that fires grenades so the players can practice parrying, which is a mechanic that is rarely used. We added these changes to improve player guidance and to make it easier for a new player to pick up the game.

What's Next

• We would like to add a consistent theme. We were thinking about making the main stage a portal landfill, where garbage comes out of the many portals that would be in this scene. We were thinking that some things that come out of the portals could affect the fight as powerups or hazards.
• The Samurai and Skeleton will be added next week, as we are struggling to brainstorm interest leg ideas.
• Add the 2-player mode. Our game works with players controlling their whole character so a 2-player fight is already implemented. We just need to add a character selection for the 2-player battle.
• We need to add more polish to the game like better parallax backgrounds, character animations, and juice when players jump or move around.
• We had a Smash Bros-like camera but we had to remove it for the submission as we did not have time to fix how it works with the splicing animation. We would like to add this in next week.