Kung Food Development Week 13 11/28-12/2

Last week, our team scrambled to finish and build our demo, and we encountered many predictable but still surprising bugs, most surrounding our controls. We were able to them out however, and this Monday we worked on a hot fix to make jumping work properly.

After showing our game to bossman, we determined the we should rework the UI as a major portion of our polish build, and make some quality of life changes.

I started by debris scaling particle size to damage, which I worked out quickly using a Niagara float variable determined by a move's damage.

I had issues however when importing new meshes for the actual particles, because I had been using sprites. These issues were related to the life cycle mode being set to self instead of system, which harmed the game's performance.

After fixing this, I fixed a bug about the carrot character's stun meter maximum by finding and removing a discrepancy between the data spreadsheet for character stats and what was called on the carrot's blueprint.

I finally was able to get pushback of moves to work, however I am not certain how. My closest guess is that the values were set too low to be noticeable, but perhaps it was some random error I removed by toying around with the launch-player blueprint.

On Thursday evening, I worked to recruit some potentially interested students to our program during Warren Tech's open house. I feel like I certainly highlighted a lot of positive aspects of game design and I wouldn't be surprised if many of those students returned in a few years when they became juniors.

To cap off the week, I drafted some music for our calamari character which I have shown here. I've been trying to adjust it to have more intensity so that it fits as a battle theme. It is definitely unique, but I think with some tweaking, the underwater, sci-fi vibes will begin to fit better with the calamari and his stage.

First Draft Iteration

First Concept Iteration

After demoing this theme and some of my prior music to a senior designer from the PM session of the class, he offered to have me commission some music for his own team's game, so I plan to help with that after I finish making frame data for the calamari.

Next week, assuming there is no game jam, when our lead artist comes back, I want to quickly review our last iteration of the game and lay out the criteria for this second demo build with more characters and a mostly complete list of features that are going to be present in final.