ART

Hey yall! 

Laurens here, I worked on a bunch of enviroment work related to cards. I made simple rfx and meshes for the lava lake card and decals + rfx for the frozen floors. Besides this I re-vamped the point screens completely. 

I also worked on a new card design but I have nothing finished to show for this.
To end off, I re-vamped the main level layout, and created level 4 (2 and 3 will be Mathis).

The lava is a pulsating material with a simple Niagara bubble system. (I am still working on the falling in rfx) 
There is also a very simple spark system for a person bouncing on the lava with proof boots.

For the it was 2 simple decals, one for the sides of the blocks, and one for the top. The side ones are stretchable accros multiple blocks without loss of quality. meaning you can manually make variation in the ice placement. The top one looks a bit intense, but if you put it on the floors it blends quite nicely. The Ice rfx are just the lava sparks but blue.

For both the lava and the ice I had to make "Proof" boots. Just some simple re-textures of base boots.

Next up are the re-worked point screens, switched from Mesh to sprite and it very much paid off.

Now for the level layout.

That's all from me, On to Mathis!

Hey guys, great to be back once again!

This week I didn't do as much as the previous weeks, but still tried to put in some good effort for the final week.

I worked mainly on some level designs like the ones above, here are some more examples:

These ended up taking a bit more time than I first thought, mainly due to playtestting and full reiterations.

Besides that Ive also put some time into making a seperate outliner effect for the cards which pulsates:

This effect is still subject to change, so isn't therefore the actual final product. However thats all for polish.

Besides that I also put a bit more love and time into the meteors and their effects:

Besides the actual meteor effect I also made the shield that absorbs the meteor strike twice and its accompanied hit effect:

Here's it with the hit effect:

Most likely during polish we'll also add a similiar effect to the player being hit where it flashes a certain color.

Finally I also spent some time on minor tweaks here and there, but nothing notable enough to bring up in the devlog. 

So for now, on to technical!

Technical

Dylan

yo, technical stuff again.

• KOTC
• Weapons
  • Plasma Pistol
  • Thunder Gun
  • Bouncy Gun
• Cards
  • Gambler's Glory
  • Meteor Mayhem
  • Lava Lake
  • Bouncy Gun Card

Alessandro

• Effects Manager
• SFX and VFX injections

KOTC

Dylan

King of the Crown is a new mechanic we added to spice up the balance of the game.

Every round now has a 20% chance of becoming a KOTC round. When it triggers, the player with the most points is marked with a visible crown above their head. Taking down the crowned player grants an extra point, giving other players a chance to catch up.

To avoid frustration, KOTC can’t happen in back-to-back rounds, so no player gets targeted twice in a row unfairly.

This mechanic adds high-stakes tension while giving lower-score players a comeback opportunity.

Weapons

Plasma Pistol

A simple, reliable pistol with a short charging delay. Once fired, it releases a high-speed beam that can penetrate walls.

Thunder Gun

Inspired by the iconic Thunder Gun from Black Ops 1 Zombies, this beast launches massive air blasts that deal light damage but send everyone flying. Great for chaos!

Bouncy Gun

A last-minute addition due to a bit of miscommunication, the Bouncy Gun is exactly what it sounds like, it fires bouncing bullets. It’s exclusive to a party card (see below) and turns the match into a pinball mess of mayhem.

Cards

Gambler's Glory

A party card that grants the player double points for the next round. Low risk, high reward, especially during a KOTC round.

Meteor Mayhem

Just what it sounds like. Meteors raining from the sky.

Lava Lake

A deadly lava pool is added to the map. If you’re not equipped for it, you’ll melt. If you are, you can use it to your advantage.

Bouncy Gun Card

Enables the Bouncy Gun for everyone in the match. Bullets now bounce around wildly, leading to unpredictable, high-chaos firefights.

Bug Fixes & Wrap-Up

Aside from the usual round of bug fixes, including one where I accidentally called the wrong point logic (oops!), that wraps up this week.

I clocked in under 10 hours this week, for two main reasons:

1. This was our last week for adding new features, anything else we had planned is getting cut to make room for polish.

2. I overworked in previous weeks, so my total time is actually still above the required 60!

If you want to see what  Sam did, I guess you'll have to play our game!

Effects Manager

Hey, it's Alessandro here! Today I'm going to walk you through the way we manage sound and visual effects in our beautiful chaotic game. We decided to go with a manager approach and there's a couple of reasons for that:

• Need for centralization to keep our structure tight and tidy.
• Access to effects from the whole codebase without explicit dependency injection.

Let's break this down a little more, shall we?  We're creating a base actor C++ class to then inherit from it as blueprints. 

Why?

Because we're going to map all effects to unique enum ids and assigning them through the blueprint editor. Handy and beautiful .

Now we need to make sure every class that might need access to our manager, actually can have access to it. 

Since the manager is an actor, it will live in the level. The easiest approach would be to register it in the game instance... and that's exactly what we're gonna do :) 

Effects Implementation

Now, for the actual effects logic: Niagara System and Sound Waves.

We're going to structure our interface to accept a resource pointer and a scene component to parent the effect.

Don't worry, I forgot to mention these are the private methods ;)

For the public interface, let's do some indirection and split up effects into groups:

That would wrap it up... But thinking about it, what if we need to play a sound in loop and stop it at a certain time? 

Easy enough; SpawnSoundAttached already returns  the audio component instance, which means we just need to extend our interface a little further.

SFX & VFX Injections

Finally after all that fluff we get to the actual usage of our actor manager! As mentioned before, it is linked to the game instance and can be accessed the following way.

Ain't we stylish now? Easy to edit, instance specific and correctly labeled. That wraps up the effects implementation and usage!

Closing Thoughts

The next two weeks are the final polishing phase. From here on, it's all about refining what's already in the game, making sure Brawlstorm is the best version of itself.

That wraps up this week’s devlog!

See you next week! 🎮