Hi, Hello, It's us again. After last week we were kind of bummed out since our programmers had his a wall with the ragdoll, and it was even brought up that we might have to drop it...

Worry not!! Your carrots can still flip-flop about since our big brain programmers are doing big brain programmer stuff to make sure it'll be in the game! They've pin-pointed the issues and started fresh where necessary, and we have something that works! It's a bit wonky in places but as the old saying goes, it's a feature, not a bug ;;)

Art

There's nothing too crazy or exciting going on art-wise. We took a break from wrestling with particles and are trying to get the bulk of our props unwrapped and textured. It's a constant process of going back and forth between different hues, reimporting and adjusting. It's not coming together quite as we hoped yet, but progress is being made!

A blank page is better than one you spilled ink on

As you may have noticed in last weeks devlog we had a lot of issues with the ragdoll and the way we implemented the movement on it, it also didn't help that we panicked and tried to do everything and anything to fix it last minute. After the meeting I decided to look again, this time with a nice cup of calming tea and an ungodly amount of dedication to make it work. I quickly noticed that we had spilled ink on our page, the ragdoll was edited to much that I couldn't find the trees in the forest anymore. I remade the ragdoll and changed up quite a bit, this time I did not give every bone its own collision. I also simplified the collision structure and made it match a more human body shape. I also removed certain bones which weren't needed.

On the left you can see the old ragdoll, on the right the new one. It seems pretty clear that starting fresh was probably the best option. So now that I had this I could focus on reworking the movement, one big thing I changed was going from a force based movement to a velocity based movement. This should reduce stretching by a good amount. I also created a new physics material which would reduce drag and bounciness of the character, by reducing drag we prevent body parts from sticking to the ground and causing stretching in the model. I also remade the way our character detects if its touching the ground, it uses a capsule cast which works a lot better than a single raycast and certainly works better than manually putting a capsule collider and checking for collisions.

Fixes fixes fixes...

On the other hand we had a lot of other stuff where there were bugs detected during some play sessions. Notably one would spawn multiple bombs or players would spawn up in the stratosphere. We had to fix those and so I did. The player respawning now works as intended and the bombs wont be multiplying any more. Players also wont be able to respawn after dying just by pressing a button, and there are a couple more.

Punch 'm, punch 'm hard

The punch, although we got it working VERY last minute right after the last devlog, it's now working even better, the character can now punch another player and tag that other player if the puncher was carrying the bomb. Better yet, it looks like he's punching now too. The arms will move in a punching motion towards the receiver of the punch. Players will now feel those punching coming in too, they will be knocked back by your punches, adding more weight to them.

Some small new features

As of now the game will wait for a couple of seconds to allow all players some time to join the game. During this time the players are now rooted, this is a state in which the players can't move to give everyone a chance to start on even terms. This means that the bomb is no longer placed on on of the two players who joined first. Secondly we have also added a bare bones pause menu with which you can pause the game or even quit the application in case you for some odd reason wouldn't want to play the game  anymore... This means you wont have to alt+f4 the game anymore to get out or as previously to restart the round. Which will no longer be necessary as stated above the game will now go on an endless loop where the players can respawn and start over after someone has won a round.

So an Alpha release ?

GET OUT THE DRINKS, FIREWORKS AND CONFETTI 

ALPHA RELEASE IS OFFICIALLY HERE !!

Thank you to everyone who is still following our progress, although the road has been bumpy we have kept going forward and will continue to do so. I guess a rollercoaster without ups and downs wouldn't be much fun tho! So come back next week and see what's next!