Small things can feel big

Our first week of polish is over, and it's a suprise how small changes can make things look so much better. One of those things are transitions. Lerping between A and B, rather than just jumping from one to the other, makes actions more organic and lively, even if it's just a solid color texture.

Code

First up for code is the update to health bars. If you've played fighting games before this one probably look familiar. When a tank takes damage, the health bar will go down like normal, but a red chunk will indicate the amount of damage taken. If no damage is taken afterward, the red bar will catch up the current health over time.

Tank movement also had a bit of polish. One of them is that tank will now lean with the directions they are turning. If they turn left, they lean to the right, and vice versa. It’s might not show too well in the gif, but it makes movement more clean in game.

The other tank update is acceleration at the start of the round or when respawning. No gif of this one, but you can trust me when I say it looks a lot better.

Pickup text got a bit of polish as well. The initial size of the text is a bit bigger, making it more easier to read what you’ve picked up. And in addition to fading out will also shrink is size before disappearing.

In addition to pickup text, combat damage also got a slight change. Before damage could only go to the top left or top right. This caused damage text to overlap often. To combat this, the now has more freedom in its horizontal direction.

With the removal of health numbers above tanks, we needed a new way to show the player when they are low health, without having to look up at the health bars all the time. To do so, we’ve added visual tank damage that becomes more clear the less health tanks have. The screenshot shows when a tank is near dead.

The rest of the code changes are mostly to get art to happen in games. With this the laser got its first polish pass where tanks being hit now show a hit particle and cause sound. Another addition is debris. Shooting obstacles and tanks, hitting obstacles as a tanks and other tanks, now causes has a chance to cause bits of debris to fly around.

Art

On the art side of our game, this week was mostly about updating the things we already had with improvements, but because the programmers finally got a chance at implementing our existing art after having to crunch out new features every week, not all of it is implemented yet. This means that while you can't experience it by yourself quite yet, it's coming to an update near you very soon!

Terrain & post-processing
For the terrain we added some animated grass. The post-processing and lighting was tweaked more to make the colors pop and the tanks stand out more.

A scorch mark was added as a permanent reminder of your victories against the other tanks, with some subtle smoke on top.

but since you can't burn water (for now at least, our science department is trying their best), we came up with this particle as an alternative.

when you're charged up enough to shoot hazards, your bullet color changes appropriatly. our homing rocket also got a brand new trail.

We also got new visual to tell you if you're currently driving in a hazard.

A smaller change that was made is that now the mud is a slightly darker color. it's not much but worth a mention since it stands out much better now. (although we should disclaim that due to a small glitch the powerup version of mud is not affected by this change yet)

And to finish it off, some work was done on the shield and ghost powerup. for now these shaders are just in unreal (so that we have access to a visual shader editor) before a programmer can get his hands on it to convert it to a unity shader. This means that it's not in the game quite yet.