Hi Everyone! As mentioned last week, we are more or less on the same level of gameplay as with the prototype, aside from the UI for the powerup inventory. Let’s see what we have done this week!

Programming

This week, we had to rewrite a part of the powerup system due to a change in how those are handled. Before the change, it was rather complicated to spawn in a powerup and we figured it would cause too many issues down the line (read: spaghetti code). 

Further, we improved the tower itself by adding springs between the blocks, this will ensure that the tower is more stable when trying to place a new block. While developing this, however, we encountered many issues, such as the physics engine launching placed blocks into space, or the tower spontaneously deciding to collapse when there was no reason to. After fixing all those bugs (and some other bugs we observed, but weren’t able to recreate consistently before), the tower now uses those springs.

Here is a taste of a bug we encountered:

The move and placement of blocks still felt not right so we reworked this a bit. We tried the same as we did in the tower and tried to add spring spring joints to the placement as well, which was first of all really confusing to work with and after a long hassle not even worth it because it didn't make things better. But then after a talk with chatGPT yeah he also has a voice in this now. He said something in the lines of increasing mass and reducing friction. So that's just what we did and to his credit, it did make a difference. The movement can still evolve in later editions, but it feels good enough to be in the game for now.

Art

The art team is still busy speccing out visuals to go along with the many powerups that will riddle the world of Tower Tricksters. Notable contenders for this week are the sticky-powerup and the confusion-powerup.

When you activate the sticky powerup, you will transform the piece that a player is currently holding into a sticky globule. This will cause the piece to stick to everything it touches. Hopefully this booger-like substance will cause terror to your opponents :) We really wanted to add a second layer of globbyness to the glob-shader by having a downwards facing buildup of extra snotgob, but given that the pieces rotate, getting the world space down axis instead of the object space was causing more problems than good, so we decided that the current was fine, and to put a pin in further developing it! See below for a gif of it doing something, but certainly not the right thing.

The confusion powerup will invert your controls, and as such we made a particle system building on the classic “stars flying around you” when you're dazed, cartoon style. This particle system will bind to your mouse cursor, if the powerup is afflicted to you, and will invert your controls until you have put down a block on the tower.

We added a wind particle effect, it is supposed that this wind particle is very subtle and not too intense as they are a background element.

For the wind particle, you can change the color, size, speed, opacity, amount of wind...

In the coming week, we will keep updating the powerups and we will finally add a menu/UI in the project.