Sprint 4 (Mar 12 - 17)

Sprint 4 (March 12–17) marked our beta demo milestone. We focused on environmental polish and clarity enhancements. Flying cars and ground vehicles were added to create a more dynamic urban environment. An exit menu was introduced to the pause screen, and damage feedback became more responsive with the addition of screen effect (around the edges) and a flashing health bar to communicate low health states, as confusion about damage was a key feedback we got in the beta playtests. Additionally, sound effects were prepared for pickups & the delivery system.

We hoped that adding flying cars would not only give the players an additional obstacle to avoid, but also make the city livelier. In previous playtests, we had a number of people ask whether the roads, which were empty at the time, would have cars. Taking this feedback into account, we decided to add them.

Adding the vehicles came with great technical difficulty however which is why it took so long to have them added to the game. We wanted the vehicles to move in a way people would expect them to in a city. This not only meant driving on roads and going through intersections, but respecting the flow of traffic and not colliding into other vehicles. We also wanted vehicles to transition from a "ground" and a "flying" state which took extra logic. The final solution that ended up being implemented was creating a number of road sections or "blocks", which were chained to one another. Vehicles would move towards the next block in the chain, and if a block had a vehicle inside it, vehicles would not enter it until the block was free.

For art side this meant creating vehicle which had a consistent scale, we went through a couple prototypes for car and truck designs before we were able to create things to a scale our and detail the Drone Delivery team was happy with. We also experimented with ideas like sky highway markers. UI icons for each delivery location were created although they weren't able to be implemented until the next sprint.

To create all the blocks, an internal tool was created to help streamline this process.