Hey everyone! Welcome to week 9 of our devlog for SKalley!

The final week of production has concluded, let's take to remember the fallen features that did not make it to production. Alrighty, now that we have finalized production, we are headed to polishing phase where we spend the last week improving and make existing features better.
But first let's talk about everything new this week!

Art
Mugshots

Outstanding progress has been made by our beloved artists, making the mugshot scene much more fit in our style we are going for in SKalley, but we are not yet satisfied and will improve on it in the polish week!
Controls
In the same image above you could see a glimpse of the control scheme used in our game, we took the liberty to make a controls decal and display it in our starting area. It fits the theme of our game very well and saves us valuable time from creating another UI

Models & Levels
New models have been created, some existing models also have updated textures. They will continue to make the world of SKalley feel full of charm and life. With new models and mechanics (Such as the carspawner), new levels have been created aswell to further diversify our procedural alley


Player Landing visualization
Since we keep emphasizing heavily on visual and sound feedback to keep players updated and inform them of everything that is happening. One of them is a landing visualization


Programming
This week, we were rather careful with implementing new stuff as this was the last week of production, we decided it would be smart to first fix all existing issues before attempting to implement new features, Quality of life improvements, and more.

* Powerups now rotate and players can only pick up one at a time.
* Player VFX displayed when corresponding behaviour happens, such as jumping and being stunned
* UI Display only showing up when needed
* Cone interaction working properly again

With them out of the way we added some brand new features

Player aligning with the ground
One feedback that kept being regularly voiced by our beloved testers, is that the movement should feel more skatelike, we decided to align the player on the ground , that essentially means, for example going up a ramp make the player look up the ramp aswell, see here


Game loop
Another thing we focused heavily is proper resetting when needed
The game restarts normally when one player remains, he/she receives a star for notoriety and if a player reaches 3 stars, the game will undergo a hard reset, removing all saved data.

Another Quality-of-life improvement is that you no longer have to keep switching between colors in between rounds. The game will memorize the input devices linked to the player.

Sound
Many new sounds have been added:
* Bouncy tires
* Countdown & game start
* powerup acquired sounds
* Cars and Policecar
* Mugshot sounds
* Being caught
* Barbed wire
* Shield powerup successfully blocking
* Stunned sound
* ...

These sounds are mainly to help players be aware of the events around them and can inform them of potential warnings or interactions, we believe you'll have a great time enjoying some of them!