Hello everyone! In the past week, we added and updated quite a few things to the project. Let’s get right to it!

Programming

First and foremost, we added a menu system to the project, so we can actually start and pause the game when necessary. Powerups are now accessible through their own menu as well, but more on that later.

While implementing the menu system, we ran into quite a few walls. Either we couldn’t use the menu, or we couldn’t play the game properly anymore. Another issue we had was the pause menu not actually doing anything. The menu would appear, but you could go on playing the game as normal. When everything was fixed properly, we ended up with a nicely working menu system. Don’t worry, the menus are not done yet from the art side, so the current dev-art will be replaced soon.

Back to the power ups, we made a small change to the way they are used in the game. Instead of being able to pick a powerup and assign it to whoever you want at the start of your turn, players (which includes yourself) can now compete to add a powerup to you, which will immediately be used. This is because it didn’t feel right that someone could add a powerup to the player long before it was their turn. With this change, we hope to make it more chaotic and strategic.

The game is also a bit simplified. While playtesting we noticed most people didn't use the 3th dimension that often, or not as we wanted it to be used, so we came with a simple solution, JUST DELETE THE WHOLE THING, yeah thats right who needs 3 dimensions when you have just 2 beautiful ones. This way you can focus more on bullying each other and a little less on the structural foundation of the tower, sorry engineers and architects but we nerfed you guys.

Art

A big push for the art team this week was to build/feed into a more competitive identity for Tower Tricksters. To work towards this, the team got together to do a brainstorming workshop on every possible aspect we could work in, to build an atmosphere that feels competitive, while still keeping it color- and playful!

The findings and the goals we set as a result of this workshop, was to introduce more dynamic elements, setting a more competitive tone through the background assets and establishing a hierarchy to make first place desirable, and last place undesirable. Not all of these systems will be in place for this week’s update, but let’s dive right into it!

We rolled out the first edition of the player's hands. For the player with the most points, they get to have a little crown attached to their cursor, so that the whole lobby can see that YOU in fact are the best :) On the flipside, the player performing the worst, will find their sleek, beautiful hand replaced with a stinky, curled up cursor. To make matters worse, paired with this the worst player will find a particle system attached to them, with buzzing flies and stink lines coming out.

UI

We have also begun jotting down cool ideas for the UI!

So far the work revolved around integrating a nice and clean way of displaying Power Ups during gameplay. We have come up with the idea of doing something trading card themed, where each and every power up has a card with its own icon!

The core idea was to build player identity by having each hold a little deck of cards, giving a sense of power, of chance and possibility to players. What hides in the deck? What will be the next move? Who will be the quickest to draw and who will win? Those were all questions asked this week by the art team and boy are we finding answers.

Given that our player icons are hands, it felt appropriate to have a card trick as part of the gameplay. 

In the future we will explore how to add character to these cards, hiding the related effect inside the cards design. 

We have of course also started producing icons for the menus and the rest of HUD.

It will be much different… But more on that next week!

In the coming week, we will be further updating the menu, art and powerups. 

See you in the next post!