Daring Diamond Defence

Week 6 of Development

Welcome to the final devlog post! In out last week of development, we mostly focussed on responding to feedback gained from last week's test session, and adding a few elements of polish.

1. Models, Textures

This week we bring new scene decorations and some texture updates. First of all, there are some updates. In last week's test, many players gave feedback about the texture of the diamond. We replaced the diamond texture and think it looks much better now, see below.

Our robbers also received a new cosmetic upgrade, giving them a ninja helmet!

Then we created textures for the fire extinguisher. What do you think?

The museum's lighting also needed to be adjusted, as the previous version had only direct light and no matching lamps. So we added chandeliers and spotlights to display artwork for this purpose.

2. Level Design, Menus & UI

As mentioned previously, we did some work to improve the lighting and associated models. This includes chandeliers mainly for scene lighting and some spotlights for artwork display. For Level 1 we have also added some paint, and lighting into the room in front of the diamond, it felt empty to be in and needed a touch. See the results for yourself:

For level 2, we added a few paintings to enhance the atmosphere and make it look more like a museum. We think the spotlights shining onto the painting is a nice touch, and adds a little more ambiance to the level.

Finally, the main menu also had changes done to give it a look more suited to the game. We change the background to something in the game and change the text colour to suit its background. In addition, the menu has been expanded to include a screen which displays the controls, and one that gives a quick backstory. Plus there are now options available in the menu, whereas before it was empty - we'll talk more about those options soon!

Another nice change is the addition of weapon icons to the player's HUD. This was a suggestion one of our testers gave us last week, and we thought it was a great idea. For every weapon the player has, a corresponding icon appears on the HUD - this helps to reduce confusion as to what weapons the player has access to and provides quick information. Icons will light up when the player equips it, and will even turn red to indicate that ammunition has run out. We think it's pretty nifty, just see for yourself:

3. Functionality & Sound

For the last week, not many changes to the core gameplay and background functionality were made. By popular demand (according to our feedback) weapon hotkeys have been added to the game, and are a very welcome addition. Now players can use either the scroll wheel or the 1, 2, 3 keys to switch weapon. This goes nicely with our newly-implemented weapon icons which appear on the HUD. With the gameplay pretty much already in place, only a few minor balance changes were made.

We have also finally added a proper range of sound effects to the game! This was another popular demand in our feedback, and we feel that the effects we have added really help to immerse the player and provide better feedback when attacking enemies and using weapons.

In one of the images above, we showed off the new options on the main menu. There are only two options at the moment, one of which being mouse sensitivity. During our test session and in the feedback gathered afterward, we became aware of the very high mouse sensitivity that players were encountering. During development we didn't encounter this issue so it took us a bit by surprise. But now we have a slider which players can adjust however they wish - this should (hopefully) please most players and make their experience much smoother! Additionally, we added a volume slider to make sure that players aren't deafened by our sound effects...

4. What Next?

Well, we've reached the end of our prototype development, but how could we take it further? What would we add next? If you want to find out, go ahead and look at our devlog post about just that!

Thank you for playing our game and following our progress! We've enjoyed bringing the game from a mere set of plans on paper to an actual functional prototype, and hope you enjoyed playing along the way!