Heya,

While I’ve been too busy to work on Samurai Showdown as much as I’d like due to a combination of family responsibilities and Global Game Jame 2017 being a thing, I have managed to find some spare time in which to work on the game. While the next PlayUp Perth (read: the one on the 3rd of Feb) is dedicated to showing off the games we made during GGJ17, I should be able to take Samurai Showdown out in public again soon and get some feedback. Furthermore, and speaking of Global Game Jam, I should have a blog on it, our game, and the PlayUp GGJ event for it sometime after the event has passed.

In any case, let’s talk about what’s been added, what’s been changed, and what’s being planned for the future!

Previous Update

 

New Features:

Profile Selection:

As of the latest build, players can now change their active profile via the character selection screen of the game. This screen appears when players choose a game mode to play and the profile selection menu can be opened by pressing the ‘options’ or ‘menu’ button on a DS4 or Xbox controller, respectively. Players can then highlight a profile using the up and down directional keys on their gamepads before selecting it by pressing the ‘X’ or ‘A’ button.

While this feature is still a little buggy (for example, it doesn’t yet update the list of available characters when the profile is changed), it seems to be working as intended otherwise.

 

New Sound Effects:

Thanks to Brian, our new sound guy, we’ve gotten a bunch of really good quality sound effects made for Samurai Showdown in only a few days. While I can’t really talk all that much about these sounds (mostly because I have no talent with sound design :v), I can tell you that they’re being played in Unity via FMOD. Becuase of this, not only do we have a great deal of control over how each sound asset sounds when it’s played, but we can also do things such as randomly selecting a sound effect to be played when certain conditions are met.

To expand on the latter example, when players are in the middle of a match and hit the correct button to score a point, one of three different ‘hit’ sound effects will be played to give players an aural indication that they scored. However, if players hit the wrong button, one of three ‘miss’ sound effects will play in order to indicate that they failed. The selection of sound effects is entirely handled by the FMOD package integrated into Unity, with the only work on my end being to tell the system whether players got the answer right or wrong.

I’ve included a set of  ‘hit’ and ‘miss’ sound effects below so that you can hear Brian’s work for yourself and I’ve also included a video demonstrating some of the new UI sound effects.

 

In Progress:

Profile Levelling

While I haven’t really had a chance to really work on this since my last update due to a combination of family responsibilities and Global Game Jam 2017,  I’m hoping to add additional effects to the levelling screen sometime in the next week. Right now I think it’ll be limited to pulsing the player’s level number when they gain enough experience to level up and adding a particle system to the end of the XP bar for extra flare.

 

Level Unlocks

As mentioned previously I’ll be making levels unlockable rewards in a similar manner to how characters are handled. In order to determine which levels are unlocked, I’ll probably work off of whichever profile has the highest level as it makes the most sense as far as I’m concerned, though this is all subject to user testing.

 

Unlock Alerts

Since I’ve basically finished the levelling system, work on the alert system has basically just started. My plans for this are pretty minor at this point, but I want to have both a sound effect to trigger when the player unlocks something and to have a pop up appear which shows what kind of thing the player just unlocked.

 

Profile Creation

While profile selection is currently working nearly as intended, profile creation has not yet been completely adjusted to take into account the new profile system. As such, I hope to have created such a system at some point in the next few weeks that can be accessed through the character selection menu in a manner similar to how it’s done in games such as the Smash Brothers series.

 

Future Plans:

Testing

Most of my plans at this point revolve around taking Samurai Showdown out to PlayUp Perth events in order to get feedback from the public. Right now motivation (and ideas) are pretty hard to find so I’m hoping that taking it out in public and hearing what people think about it can help me to get back into the swing of thing.

 

New Sprites

Thanks to a very kind offer to volunteer by a person who was involved in Samurai Showdown in the past, I’m looking to get some additional sprites made for the UI and characters of Samurai Showdown. While I initially plan to focus on the UI of the game, I hope to design some cool new characters soon so that we can give players a bunch of things to unlock as they play.

 

Bug Fixing

This will primarily revolve around sorting out the issue around available characters not refreshing when the player changes their active profile, making it so that the profile buttons scale properly, and making it so that the scroll view actually scrolls with the player’s selection.

 

Final notes:

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this (somewhat thin) update on Samurai Showdown. I’m really looking forward to taking it out in public again, and I hope to get it out in the world sometime soon. With any luck I’ll make a billion dollars (you know, as you do), but I’ll settle for it being released as my first commercial product 😛

See ya!