Hey Ninjas!

This is week two of our devlogs discussing our game, Ninjas on Trampolines!

Oh boy, was this week productive. Lots of back-end changes to trampolines, animations, UI/UX, tricks and a new game mode in the works. While most of this is not ready to be shown off quite yet, we are still excited to show what we can. For starters, players are now able to paint the background without the need to paint other players with a new mechanic we dubbed “Tricks”. These will be discussed in greater detail below. Along with this, we changed how paint looks. Paint splatters now have outlines and a more consistent look to each splat you get. New character animations are beginning to be put into the game and be adjusted based on what we find. We are excited to show off the new look once the time comes. UI/UX is something that is lacking extensively throughout the game. Initial mockups have been created for what they could look like and some in engine work has been done to test out how it could feel. Trampolines are as much of a pain as always, fix one thing and 3 more problems show up. We’ll talk more about trampolines as they get closer to completion. As for the new game mode… 

Paintball: Enter into the arena with a massive sponge ball that absorbs the paint of those who attack it. But beware, if the ball is not your color it is a dangerous object, flying around, painting both the background and players in its path.

Recent Additions

UI/UX: 

The concept moving forward for UI/UX is playing very heavily off of being a painter in the game. Most of the UI will have a painting palette in the background with your buttons/elements being the paint on that palette. We also plan on adding the ability to practice before a match. This would mean creating an area for people to jump around once they ready up their character. By doing this, we hope to teach the player mechanics and allow for warmups before the match starts. 

Paintball: 

The Paintball game mode adds a large physics-based ball into the stage. If players attack the ball, the ball will change to their color and start bouncing around the stage, leaving paint in its wake.  If the ball collides with another player that doesn’t share its color, it will paint them.  The paintball will slowly lose paint over time, so, if you want to keep control over the paintball, you will have to keep hitting it.  When the ball runs out of paint it will return to a neutral state, no longer painting the background or players.

Tricks: 

The idea of having tricks has been in the backlog since the beginning of this games’ development. The premise behind them is to allow players to passively gain paint on the background so they are not forced entirely to fight. So far, we have 8 directional inputs, all controlled through the right joystick on a controller. A small splatter of paint will follow the direction the joystick is flicked, but only once per trampoline bounce. These are still in a primitive state and will be developed further in the coming weeks. 

UI/UX:

As of right now we have placeholder UI, if you could even call it that. Its only purpose is to allow us to get from the main menu to a match and back to the main menu. Over the course of the coming weeks development on a more finalized version will begin to be developed. While it might take some time to get in the engine itself the drawings and wireframes will be shown off at times to give you all the ability to comment on them. Plans are for the UI to be completely customized to our game with animations, art and design all being done in house.

Recent Changes

Paint:

Paint splatters are no longer just multiple circles in close proximity. Now, the paint splatters are selected from premade textures that are scaled and resized to get the look of a paint stroke or splatter. Paint can now also be applied to the walls and ground of the level, though, if paint does get onto these surfaces they will not be considered into the final score. We wanted this to be purely cosmetic. 

Game modes:

Hold the Crown has also received some changes with the paint splatter, as it now represents a streak of paint instead of a splatter. The new idea is to make a paint roller follow the player instead of a crown. We still don’t have a title for the game mode so let us know if you think of one. When the player is not moving, there will be no paint applied onto the background, emphasizing that the player with the crown should be constantly moving. This change was made to allow for this game mode to better fit in with the painting narrative consistent throughout our game. We still need to do some testing to make sure the crown is not too overpowered, but as of right now, we are super happy with the results.

In the coming weeks, we plan to keep improving trampolines, keep refining our newest game modes, and continue bringing in all the new animations of the character.  Until next time!

Olympus Interactive