Hey everyone! Welcome to week 7 of our devlog for SKalley!

The second production sprint has begun, and honestly we are proud of ourselves this week, we have improved and expanded on a lot of new and exciting features along with a more visually pleasing game! Let's not keep you waiting and get right into the devlog!

Art
Lighting
We decided to play around with lighting in Unity to offer a pleasing to look at lighting. For that we have set with a nightly scene in the Alleyway. Another fun thing we did with the light is that we added a police helicopter chase light, that shines a spotlight on the alley, giving players the feel they are being chased by the police actively. See here the results of the lighting in our game so far!

Shaders
We improved our player outline shader to be visually correct and also have each player have their own outline color, this is especially useful for when they are behind certain objects or scenes so they don't get lost, and also make them more visually visible.


New meshes & textures
There has also been some newly created objects which can help us dress up the scene more nicely and of course provide visual feedback.

UI & HUD
We finally added player feedback in the form of UI, but we had to make it clear enough to communicate to the player, and find a fitting position in our screen that will not hinder the current gameplay too much. And so far we have our first iteration of the UI where players can get the dash cooldown and their currently held powerup seen on the screen as feedback. 

Aside from that we also added some black bars to add as a cinematic effect that they are being chased, we found this to be cool and hope that you all will too!




Decals
Our hardworking artists have experimented with some decals such as graffiti marks to be used within our game, results are promising so far and we hope we can give our game the charm and style that it so rightfully deserves!

Programming
Countdown
Last week we added a startingzone where players could enter to ready up. but we decided to take some things further and more fleshed out by adding a countdown before actually starting, it gives the players the chance to really prepare for the intense gameplay that awaits them.


Camera movement
We once again improved the dynamic camera to be more smoother during gameplay, what can it do now? You, yes you as a player can now dictate the flow of the game, if you are faster then the camera, the camera will decide to follow you and keep up with you, this is useful to apply pressure and give our game a more intense gameplay.

Spraycan powerup
We finally added a new powerup in the form of a spraycan, what does it do exactly? well good question, you use it as a speedboost! You gain a temporary increase in speed for a limited duration of time, this can be helpful in situations such as evading certain traps or warmongering players or even use it to apply pressure on the players by making the camera move faster to keep up with you!

Police car trap
For too long the police in our game ar being considered useless, so we decided to utilize some of our beautifully created assets, namely the policecar as a environmental hazard, it can now move around in any direction and "arrest" any unfortunate skaters in front of them. But of course we also took player feedback into account and visualized the path the cars will take. 



Game loop
Now, this a bit of a work in progress still, but basically we now have a complete game loop! if one player ends up being victorious, the game will restart, but we plan to expand it to have a more thought out winning condition and a fun way to encourage scheming against a "most wanted" player. Maybe we will also have some incentives, but we will see! See below for a concept of how we might approach this.


Fixes and bugs
Along all those new features, we of course encountered new bugs and unexpected behaviours, but with a hard-working team as us, we quickly get it patched up. Overall, it should have almost no weird and game-breaking stuff (that we discovered so far) present. 
Such fixes include:
* Active powerup gets deactivated immediately upon picking up a new powerup
* Level generation
* Barbed wire behaviour
* Bouncy tires launching players into space (sponsored by yours truly, NASA)
* general player movement
* and more

Sound
This week we added some new sounds to liven up the alleyway into an actual competitive survival feel. We also fixed existing problems within our sound system and it should be mostly cleaned up and working. 
The most notable sound implementation is the jump sounds and wheel spin sounds of the skateboards in various states.