The Tentacle Spectacle

Progress so far🚀

Another week, another update from us, thanks for sticking around!
It is our 2nd week of Sprint 2 and we are right on track, let's take a look at what we have been up to.

Art 🎨🖌️

Our lovely artists have been working on framerates, sequences, and special effects. A cursor has been made so that we could later implement all four player cursors into the start menu for choice clarity. We also have an options menu now, and an instructions page before starting the game, so any newcomers won't be super confused when opening up our game! Here's a peek:

And another one:

Beautiful. We know. 
Anyway, a lot of work has been put into new tentacle animations this week. Before they had a few idles and a slap animation, that was the minimum that we required. Now, with the new intro and outro sequences, they needed some more action! Look at these moves:
"Bleh!" He died. :(

And this is how our boss uses the tentacles to pull himself up and the intro sequence.

We have a third animation to show, but it can wait until the end! Take a peek at how the tentacles carry George up in the intro:

What's the outro win and loss screens you say? You ask, we deliver:
This is how you win,

and this is how you lose. 

Ignore the fact that the characters are cheering, they defaulted in the Editor mode, the only one cheering inside is George (the boss).

Programming🖥️

We have linked the intro and outro sequences to the game, making it clear where is the start of the game, and the end. Next to that we have been implementing various FX into the gameplay, such as a glowing stream connecting two hold notes together. A lot of bugs and problems arise every week, but we are steadily taking care of them one by one. We are now working on connected notes and trying to implement them in the game, more on them from our teammate below!

Audio🎶

This week I worked on a part of the connected note system. Specifically, I added a way to send a different signal to the programmers when two notes happen at the same time — either for players 1 and 2, or 3 and 4. This adds a new mechanic to the game where both players have to hit a note at the same time or take damage.

I also wrote a second lookahead function for hold notes. Now the system can detect how long a hold note will be before it spawns, which should help the visuals to be extra clear.

On the music side, I took another pass at improving the MIDI track’s difficulty curve — still fine-tuning that balance between challenge and flow. Lastly I also created a few new sound effects for the intro of the level, helping to set the tone right from the start.

What’s Next?🎯

We still have some things to implement, but we are confidently nearing the end of the second sprint, and we will be able to start polishing what we have made so that our game becomes even smoother and better. See you guys next week! George is saying CYA!