After three weeks of hard work, our second production sprint is finally over.  We started off our week with some game- and editor breaking bugs, but putting our heads together, we got it fixed and ended in style.

Programming

This week Karel focused on our obstacles. The traffic cones can be thrown while the roadworks barrier can only be dragged around. Karel also gave our ducks some survival instincts and taught them that walking into cars isn't a great idea. 

Meanwhile Ine was hard at work hunting down bugs and getting them fixed. Anything from players and grandmas not getting up to spawning UI elements and making sure our menus have controller input—Ine can do it all.

Art

To start off, Cui designed a new visual for our button-mashing UI. Savvas then took this design and made a small animation that, together with Daan's help, resulted in a new UI element. And thanks to Cui, we now have an effect for when players pick up something too. Teamwork really does make the dream work. 

Savvas came up with some ideas for dust clouds left behind by running players, which Daan turned into reality. 

From Savvas's sketch

To Daan's FX

Cui also worked on some animations for the grass and trees to make them look like they're swaying in the wind. 

It took a lot of hard work from Daan, but he made our HUD pass every test we could think of, and we couldn't be prouder of the final result.

Previously, players camera didn't like it whenever you'd be close to buildings and other obstacles. Daan took care of this and added both a smooth zoom-in and made those obstacles see-through. 

Let's be honest, no car would infinitely wait behind a roadblock. After realising this, Savvas made our roadblocks fall apart over time so cars can get on there way again. 

Sound

Eliott added some more sounds to the game. Our background noise now features birdsong to match last week's added birds. Grandma has found her voice and has become a lot more vocal this week. She now has sounds for getting picked up, being thrown, and falling on the ground. No grandmas were harmed in the making of these sounds. Some more work also went into the cloth and footstep sounds, as well as the scoring sounds. 

Next week

Now that production is over, we have two more weeks of polish. During this, we'll take a good look at all we've done so far and improve all that we can. This does also mean that we'll no longer be adding new features to the game. But worry not for there is plenty of fun to be had in GrandmaMania.

Till next week!