Official Release Delayed to March 1st and Entering the Polish Phase Pre-launch
Hello Captains ! Our team has decided on a slight delay to March 1st for the official GBF 2.0 release as it has just come to our attention that a certain very highly anticipated game concerning a piece of jewelry comes out this Friday and our tiny team wants to avoid drowning in the sea of press coverage concerning that game on that day. With that said the last few weeks have been all about polish as we get GBF ready for it’s official debut next week!
Polish itself is kind of an abstract term and it means so many different things according to the team , project, and development timeline and so we figured this is a fun chance to discuss polish in our project!
Finalizing Visual Assets
As we iterate our environments our texture passes improve and one of the final things our Lead artist noticed was the lack of normal maps on some of our textures , these are just two sections where you can see how a single normal map dramatically changes the detail and vibrant nature of different areas. So we are doing a pretty thorough normal map pass right now. Whether it's the metallic sheen of the rotunda or the vibrant nature of the discotheque floor we're working to include the small visual touches which will enhance our game as a complete experience !
Particles and Audio Massaging
Two areas that add small but significant detail to your game are particles and audio, particularly in VR where those both play a role in establishing presence and make the characters and objects in a virtual world feel more alive. For example our Magma Sword features a vibrating hologram flame sound that you hear increase in volume the closer to your face you hold the sword and also features a licking flame particle trail , these are just to add detail and make the weapons more fun to use in combat .
Adding Small Modifiers That Make Big Differences
There are a few key differences between the difficulty modes in Galactic Bar fight 2.0 . The modes each feature a score multiplier easy (1X), Medium (2X), or Hard (3x) allow for players to get bigger scores on more challenging difficulties, there is also an ammo handicap in place so that players on lower difficulties have more ammo to work with in combat the easier the difficulty is , and lastly the spawn rate is higher for the normal and hard modes where more enemies are likely to spawn in general every time a spawn portal opens.
Massaging theNumbers and Experience
The hardest thing about managing difficulty is that you can’t really KNOW how skilled a player is so we have to do some basic math and guessing while also looking at playtests data to determine what a hard difficulty is beyond just our own capabilities as the design team . So we are beginning to really further refine what the ideal scoring and achievement ranges are in our game. The shooting Gallery was one such area where it seemed like the Playtesters were obliterating our base score values so we'll bump them up just to be a bit more challenging.
Bug fixes and tweaks galore
7th passes on AI, 4th passes on UI , 12th passes on lighting double-checking the doors sound like doors should, physics systems tweaks. There are lots of tiny adjustments that need to be made late in a games development , tweaking volume settings, determining which audio should be 3D which audio should be 2D, how fast should certain text fields populate? Do we have a place to view this data or that data ? Did we let player know where they can view their stats and data ? The AI bunches up a lot , where can we modify the parameters to make sure they more evenly spread around the environment?
It’s a lot of small adjustments that ( we hope) help make the gameplay experience run smoother overall and hopefuly make it more fun for , you, the players.
We are so excited to share our full GBF 2.0 vision with you and as we hammer out and sandpaper the finishing polishing touches we look forward to sharing all of our hard work with you, thank you for reading and we will see you launch day next week!
