Squid Pro Quo

Progress so far🚀

Hello Hello!

This was a busy week for the Beats of the Deep team. There were loads of assets and FX to implement on top of a few persistent bugs that needed a good squashing.

Art 🎨🖌️

The art team received a push towards spectacle by our beloved supervisors, mainly to give the player more feedback by showing what their attacks actually do to the boss. A hit flash was added to the boss when attacked and he received three new idle sprites. Now George gets increasingly more beat up over the course of the song! At 75%, 50% and 25% health he gets a new idle, functioning as a progress indicator for the player on top of his health bar.

The players' ultimate attack also received a complete overhaul. Previously, the only visual change for the ult had been a different animation and a button guide. Did this function? Technically. Was it cool? Absolutely not. Our tech artist took it upon himself to turn our mildly disappointing ult attach into a visual bomb. 

You may have noticed the neon borders surrounding the note lanes. This is to help distinguish each players' note lane when you're watching the notes arrive! If the player does well, the note lane will catch fire in their respective colour. 

We also experimented with rounding out the edges of our note lane, but our team remains unconvinced. Let us know if rounded or straight is the way to go! 

Lastly, Beats from the Deep has an icon now! 

That's it for the art team, until next week!

Programming🖥️

Once again for programmer this week was mostly about implementation of assets and fixing bugs. We finally put away hold notes as all of its related bugs are (hopefully) fixed, and we solved about 20 other miscellaneous bugs that popped up throughout this week. As for implementing we have implemented a new Ultimate SFX, a loading screen before the game start, functional audio sliders, Functional controller based UI, Boss damaged Sprites, and a couple others. This brings a close to any new features to our game meaning for the next two weeks we programmers will mostly focus on ironing out any kinks in the implemented features and as always lots of bug fixings .

Audio🎶

This week I put together a sound sequence for the victory moment — the part where everything kicks off when you win. It’s meant to feel satisfying and energetic, a proper payoff after the chaos of the boss battle. 

I also spent some time on the music mix, starting to balance things more so all the elements sit better together. It’s still early in the mixing process, but it's already making the track feel tighter and more polished. 

On the sound design side, I started creating new effects for the ultimate ability. These need to really stand out and feel powerful, so I’m experimenting with different layers and textures to find the right sound. And, once again, I went back to the MIDI file to tweak the difficulty — still working on getting the right flow so it’s challenging without being frustrating.

What’s Next?🎯

We're about to move on to polish! Next phase is all about smoothing out the rough edges and making Beats of the Deep as comfortable and visually pleasing as possible. Stay tuned!