Devlog #6: Environment Models and polish

Hello, welcome to week #6 of Salt, Grooves, and Garlic developlment.

This week, we finished and implemented the environment models. It’s a gothic-inspired DJ set with pointy spires and pulsing lights and speakers! We also added a new garlic model for the pickup, and the WIP player model.

During the GDDC playtest on Friday, we got a lot of great feedback from people playing our game. A big issue seemed to be that people have a hard time understanding what’s happening the first they played the game, so we wanted to have more visual feedback to hopefully improve clarity.

After they play for a minute or so and seem to get into the groove more, things go a lot smoother. In the future, we will definitely need a good tutorial so that people get the intuition for how to play the game quickly.

Other feedback involved some sections being too overwhelming, and inputs sometimes feeling like they are not responsive.

Other things we did this week:

• New player model and prop models
• New particle effects for projectile hits and taking damage
• UI improvements
• Added simple score tracking
• Allowing “free movement”, meaning the player will immediately move when they input a command, instead of only visually moving on the beat (with mechanics to prevent spamming)
• Latency calibration improvements
• Updated menu music
• Updated vampire boss music