We finally made it! After 12 weeks of blood, sweat, and tears GrandmaMania is released. So one last time, let's go over what changed since last week shall we? As a refresher, we are in the polishing phase. This means that we've mostly been improving on existing features and player feedback.

Art

At the start of this week we noticed that our framerate was getting low at times. In order to fix this both art and programming took a look at what might be the cause. For art, this was handled by our resident tech artist Daan. He found that there were quite a few default rendering features in Unreal that we didn't rely on for visual. These were promptly disabled.

This however led to a few problems:

Here, the outline of some buildings disappears when the UI shows up.

Daan and Cui then looked into the vertex shader used to animate our grass and trees to see if that could be improved. After a bunch of testing, Cui found two separate fixes for our grass and trees while also managing to add in some randomisation.

During playtesting we learned that new players didn't instinctively know they could pick up roadblocks and cones. In an effort to make this clearer Daan changed the outline colour of our obstacles, along with the grandmas, when a player is near.

Daan gave the physics asset for the grandma a glow up. A physics asset is used for simulating physics-based interactions and collisions for characters or any object with a skeleton. In simpler terms: it's very important for ragdolling. And since our grandmas spend quite some time being ragdolled, they might as well better while doing it. With the updated physics asset, a ragdolled grandma now look like she has actual bones inside her instead of jelly.

Cui created some smoke effects for the roadblock falling apart and to cover up the destruction of the cones. Ine helped out by hooking the big smoke to the right event.

Now that our grandmas have stopped jaywalking, Cui added in some extra sidewalks in to let them cross the street safely.

Curtesy of Cui, we now have an updated logo! GrandmaMania wouldn't be what it is without grandmas so her face is now front and centre.

Last but not least, we have a trailer! Savvas did an excellent job highlighting all of our gameplay features in a short and snappy video, if you ask me. But be sure to take a look at it yourself too!

https://youtu.be/qVzq-aUozMs

Programming

With a lot of polish comes a lot of bug fixes and tiny little tweaks to make the game feel better. 

• If a player grabbed a grandma but accidentally dropped her right away, that player couldn't instantly pick her back up: To prevent spam stealing, we put a cooldown in place. However this cooldown also blocked that same player that just dropped her. Luckily Ine fixed this.
• Little changes also take from in Karel making the area to deposit grandmas in a bit bigger.
• The ready up screen also functions as a pause screen but players couldn't actually give input on it yet. Karel fixed this by making the input for the player who paused the game count for the both of them.
• Ducks, in all their malice, would sometimes block traffic completely until the end of the game.
They were offered a raise and accepted to stop this behavior.

• When restarting the game we'd have a third player magically join in even though we only have two controllers connected. Ine and Karel figured out this extra player was added during the ready up screen and Karel prevented it from happening again.
• In intersections, cars would sometimes get confused and completely ignore roadblocks and cones. The drivers were arrested and fined.
• The camera would clip through trees, now it ducks under to keep a clear view of the player.
• The rumble on the controllers wasn't impactful enough, so we made it trigger when throwing and scoring a grandma. It also has varying intensity based on the action

Sometimes one issue can manifest itself into multiple bugs. This week both of our programmers got their own version of this to deal with. Ine had two bugs that were closely related to each other: Grandmas registered as having landed on the ground too early, and players behaving weird when hit by cars or ducks. Both of these where caused by an issue in the ragdolling code.Now our grandmas land exactly when they should and player gracefully fly through the air when run over.

Karel's version of this took form in obstacles being destroyed too soon and cars seemingly stopping in random locations. Both of these were a side effect of the new outline that Daan added. In order for it to work, Daan added an extra collision shape. This made vehicles stop for grandmas and start breaking down obstacles meters away from them. It was absolute chaos! But, after changing a few settings, this was quickly fixed.

During our final round of bug hunting, Ine found some bugs that had previously slipped by:

• Daans new outline for obstacles would turn off if one of the two players close to it ran aways. To fix this, Ine made sure that the obstacles keep track of the number of players, and that the outline only disappears when no players are near.
• The newly added scoring rumble only worked for grandmas that were held when touching the ambulance. This meant that for thrown grandmas there was no rumble and even worse no sound. Luckily this was quite easy to fix and while playing around with that, Ine discovered another bug as well. The scoring feedback would play even if a player put grandma in the wrong ambulance. Since only putting grandma in your own ambulance gives you points, it would be confusing if the feedback played at the wrong time.

Sound

With the improved physics and fixed code bugs, the sound has to be top notch to match the aestethic of the game!

Eliott started by fixing newly arised issues such as:

• The ambiance track playing in the menu while the music wasn't after finishing a game.
• The roadblock dragging sound playing when it's not moving.

With players and grandmas now getting thrown away by cars and ducks, they ought to have proper impact sounds and voicelines:

• Ducks and cars now make a squeaky and clank sound respectively when ran into.
• Players and grandmas make a slightly over-the-top impact sound when falling on the floor.
• Grandmas no longer only sing "Lalalalalaaaaa~" when wandering around and now scream for their life when being carried!

What now?

That's it! Grandma Mania is officially finished.

Thanks for sticking with us through this journey and we hope you'll enjoy the game!