The Ink-credible Polish phase

Progress so far🚀

Hello little inklings, we are almost at the end of the road. 

It is officially the Polish phase - where we do not add any more new gameplay features, but focus on making our game smooth and shiny. Can you believe that our game will be finished at the end of next week? Anyway, let's take a look at what we did:

Art 🎨🖌️

Our artists have been polishing up the effects and the menu's. Instead of the plain background in the main menu, we've decided to opt for an actual scene! Now you can see the characters outside of the cave, looking in. You all know what awaits them.

Do not worry, adjusting the button placement is in our plans. And the buttons now react to you pressing, but we are going to polish it up more!


pretty banger if you ask me
So now our menu's are actually cuts from our "outside" environment, instead of the static single image. We've also added some basic idle animations for the Join-in menu!

So cute!
We've also done some optimisations to the lights in the game, which should increase performance while playing, we all know how much smooth gameplay is important to rhythm games.

We've tried to make the tentacles more clearer, hopefully they do!
There has also been some clarity fixing - adjusting the brightness of certain effects, making the Y note much more yellower than before, moving around the controls menu before the game start. We also flash the note lane purple if you miss, which is a bit extreme at the moment, but we will adjust it, and also stars appear over your character if you get hit!

There are also effects for filling your ultimate by hitting the notes correctly:

There are also stalactites waiting to be put into the cave for decoration, to break up our boring repetitive rocks a bit:

And finally, we got an ultimate that kicks... butt (keeping this PG13), but due to file size limitations we can only show a tiny version of it:

Art team out!

Programming🖥️

For this week our programmers split up their efforts. With one focusing on implementing the sprint 2 art assets and the polish ones, whilst another worked on optimizing our game further so that those pesky lag spikes and performance dips and such stop plaguing our game. This meant that for one of them he had to do a bunch of small quick tasks in quick succesion, while another had to spend hours profiling the game to figure out whats causing the problem (and then fix it). Hopefully all of this shows in todays build and the game feels more polished, responsive and less laggy. Check out some examples of the features that were not shown above:

Audio🎶

This week, our sound guy had a busy schedule, but still managed to squeeze in some small updates. He added a chaotic twist to the end of our track—triggering a barrage of boss attacks if you take too long to kill the boss. He also fine-tuned the volume of all sound effects to sit more smoothly in the mix and built a handy component that lets in-game elements, like lights, sync up with the beat.

What’s Next?🎯

What's next is... the end. The end of the line. It will be our last polish week, scary and exciting. We will see you then!