Introduction

Welcome back to our barber shop💈🔪, dear customer. We are cleaning🧹 the consult to prepare for opening. Feeding the leeches🪱, sharpening the hammer🔨 and heating the ointments🧉.

We have focus on making the game as responsive as possible. Putting all our efforts on improving player feedback and UX. Let us tell you about it:

Art

Mask

We needed to give a face to our doctors, well cover it. Mouth stitching and some other small wear details have been added to the mask. Blood and dust were also added to make it appear old and used in the past. A band behind the head to hold the mask and studs on the sides were added. In addition to this, Lorenzo have added additional wear and scratches. All details, shadows, highlights and components have been hand painted.

Splashart

Due to the lack of extra time we organized the task in two steps.

First we will position the doctor and patient to imitate the splashart idea. Doing a render of the room with the models of patient and doctor in position. With that we will have a start screen and a splashart for Itch.io.

Second, if we have extra time, we could draw over that render to make it in the book style and make it look prettier. 

Finally for the splashart a new scene was made in unity and a suitable pose was made in maya for the plague doctor. The composition of the room has been changed slightly from the one in the game to make it more interesting. Post production work was done in Photoshop to adjust shadows, light and color.

2D Guidance

To give more guidance to the player and improve UX we added small pieces of paper remembering the patient the controllers of each area.

Shaders and VFX

We started giving some sense to the light by putting fire where our spot lights were. A simple 2D animation with two planes crossed showing the same fire. The intention is to call the player eye with this animation. As the torches will be in the are that we want them to look (same as the light they emit).

 Ruta added floating dust around interactable objects with the same purpose, calling attention. And of course pretty purposes. The curl noise works a bit weird and with position it seems broken, but she found a workaround using initial random velocity which produces something very similar.

The highlight shader needed to be more obvious so Ruta made the shader overlay the color override to make it more visible. She made one option at first with lerping, but that didn't look too good. The process of linearly interpolating between colors makes it look desaturated and Hue shifted as you would expect. She remade the same idea but with screening (adding) the override color over the base render, this produces an effect that's clearer, brighter, and more visually striking - what we needed to improve the player feedback.

The shader lines were changed to hand made ones and now it looks amazing. While it would be a lot more efficient and more controllable to use lightmap UVs or another UV channel, this will save a LOT of time, as NO additional work on any asset is needed. We excluded the doctor from this layer though, as it can look a bit weird on their hands while walking.

Lights

The lights were also reworked to direct player view to them and to improve the quality of the scene. We increased the lighting, adjusted values, added windows that cast sharp light. Play around with contrast and light temperature. 
We tried pushing the light to all interactive areas, made the lights more direct and soft.

Sound

All the sounds are downloaded and added in Unity. Pablo created a Audio Manager that controls all the sounds and allows them to be trigger by code.

For that the code that needs it has to create a private Audio Manager and:

_audioManager = FindObjectOfType();

To start a sound we only have to run:

 _audioManager.Play("SoundName");

This are all the sounds:

Bell
Body into the well:
Body de spawn when healed
Body spawn

Apply Cauterize tool
Drop Cauterize tool
Pick up Cauterize tool
Apply Scalpel
Drop Scalpel
Pick Scalpel
Apply Doctor Touch
Drop Doctor Touch
Pick Doctor Touch
Leech Apply
Leech Drop
Leech Pick up

Wrong healing method
Correct healing method
Patient die
Patient completely heal

Pestle when combining
Ointment applied

Picking up flower
Cut flower

Programming

Sound

Revekka changed the Audio Manager to be a singleton as there can only be one audio manager in the game and this provides for more secure code. No need for Finding object of type every time, if we want to play sound you can just use AudioManager.Instance.Play("SoundName"); anywhere in the code with nothing else. She also implemented in code all the audios not related to Starting Screen and Book.

Animations

Our programmer also made sure that all animations were working properly. She edited player prefab, edited the animator so the doctor has now the new animations with the hand in front, adjusted the hand holder to the right-hand join, moved the camera and limited the angle for looking around. This is specially taken a lot of time, as we had an issue with the rotation of the animations that basically bugged them. And part of our code was dependent on the animations to trigger.

Implementing

To ease the gameplay for the player we want to make an easier first patient with a lot of time. So the players can find out what is happening and start playing. Patient 0 has 6 minutes and only yellow bubos that are enormous. That will make it easier for the player to identify them. They will also learn how to make an ointment and that they have to apply it to each bubo.

A lot of the 

Conclusions

Polish was successful and brought the game into the next level. All feel responsive and nice to play. We are mostly worried that we didnt have that much playtest, but we still have some day to improve.

One last thing we wanted to implement is a closing cinematic. With a small 2D animation showing what has been achieve during the gameplay. Basically how much time did it take and how many patients survived. We hope to be able to do that for the lat 5 hours of work.

And that's all for now our most beloved clients, may sickness and plague bestow upon thee so we see each other again soon in our barber shop!🩻🩻