Devlog 9

Hey! We’re back again with another weekly devlog. Like always, we’ll go over each discipline one by one and review the most important changes to them since last week:

Game Design & Level Design:

We made the tutorial section longer to add some breathing room in-between the UI prompts. This was due to our observations in the recent playtests where players had a hard time catching up with the the tutorial.

The other changes to the tutorial section include updating the tutorial text to make it clear that players should alternate between wings in order to fly, and adding a white line to the rhythm bars for making the timing more clear, as well as having only one bar active at a time.

Programming:

Due to numerous requests from playtesters, we added a new setting to the options menu for adjusting the camera sensitivity.

Also, due to the common issue of losing the sense of rhythm after the tutorial section, we defined a new button that brings the rhythm bars back again at any time during gameplay. This ability is communicated to the player with a short line of text as soon as they finish the tutorial.

Art:

The controls images in the options menu were a bit stretched in the previous build, which is why we fixed them and then cropped the negative spaces.

Also, new textures were created and implemented for the dead trees and the gravestones. However, new versions are also in the works to make them more detailed for the next build.

Audio:

The game now plays bat squeak sounds depending on the player velocity by checking it in real-time. Other than this, there weren’t any other new changes in terms of the audio.

Next Steps:

It sounds unbelievable but only one more week is left of the development. That is why we are now only focusing on fixing the remaining bugs and adding more polish as much as possible. The game is feature complete at this point and we won’t be adding any new things to it.

The polish tasks that we currently have on our list include most aspects of the game, from the bat controls to the menus. So, we’re working hard on them and can’t wait to publish the best version of the game here on itch by August 6.