Kraken Me Up Over Here

Progress so far🚀

Hello hello everyone. 

This week was filled with playtesting and fixing bugs. With every play we found bumps in the road that got smoothed out by or team just as swiftly as we'd found them. At the moment we are putting all our time and effort into making it fun and comfortable to play while our art team is working towards tossing out all our placeholder UI.

Art 🎨🖌️

Our style artists turned their attention to our mildly depressing menus that were begging for a revamp.  The main menu, options, character select, victory and defeat screens got a complete overhaul from utilitarian to aesthetically pleasing. Slowly but surely, this project is shaping up to be quite the pretty picture.

Currently they are working on an intro sequence where our boss George rises from the depths. George himself got a minor revamp, too. His eyes got a glow in the dark update, making him extra menacing.

Our tech artist spent the week doing is absolute favourite thing in the world (not): creating masking materials. He revamped the player ultimate bar and boss health bar. He also changed the framerate on the tentacle animations so they'd match the choppy style of our pixel sprites. All in all. the art team is solidifying Beats from the Deep's visual identity, one task at a time. 

Programming🖥️

The programmers have been busy wrapping up some leftover tasks from Sprint 1, like finishing the player animations and the tentacle slap. Once that was done, they moved on to hooking up the functionality for a bunch of art assets — including the boss health bar, player attack charge, player health bar, revival FX, note grade text FX, and the ultimate bar. They also squashed a few annoying bugs along the way. Some highlights: 

- Fixed an issue where hold notes were graded incorrectly. 

- Fixed hold notes not getting properly removed from the queue if they weren't clicked. 

On top of that, they gave the note-hitting system a little revamp! Now, when you hit a note, the game checks if the next note in the queue is actually closer to the endpoint than the previous one — and pops the closest one. The idea is to make the gameplay feel even tighter and more satisfying.

Audio🎶

This week I focused on expanding the sound effects for Beats From The Deep. I worked on new sounds for the boss attack hit, button presses, player revive, player damage, and player death. It’s starting to feel like the soundscape is actually supporting the gameplay now, giving players clear feedback for important actions. Next up is mixing the sounds because some of the volume and clarity is still of. This is because we have so many players all doing things at the same time on top of an already busy song. This is hard to balance but I’m going to give it my best shot. I’ve already made sure that each player’s sound exists in a different part of the frequency spectrum so that we don’t get too much clashing. I also spent some time refining the MIDI track we’re using for note hit timing. The version we had last week had a pretty big difficulty spike halfway through, which threw off the rhythm and flow. After some tweaking, the progression feels a lot smoother and more consistent. One highlight this week was testing the music on a big sound system at a concert hall. It was great to hear how the track holds up at high volume — it sounded strong, and people gave really positive feedback. I got some fresh ideas for improvements that I’m excited to start working into the next version of the music.

What’s Next?🎯

The art team will spend the next week finishing up the missing fx and animations while also timing the existing animations to match the beat of the music. The programming team are going to implement all of the assets and fx that the sound and art team have so lovingly provided on top of smoothing out some bugs and, if time allows, adding an extra mechanic or two. Lots to look forward to!