Welcome to the final Dance Monkey Dance Devlog!

This week was spent compiling feedback given from last weeks playtesting session and implementing necessary changes in order to improve the overall experience of the player.

The first noticeable change is an overhaul to the levels visual appearance. A HDRI was added, as well as various textures. This is to add a little more polish to the game and work on really nailing the feel and aesthetic of the prototype.

Another major change was to decide to focus more so on the melee aspect of the game rather than than shooting, forcing players to engage more with the enemies and do less awkward backwards parkour which is very frustrating to try and pull off, as we found out quickly from testing. A change of the pistol to only a single shot at base level forces players to rely on their melee weapon and dash attack, and encourage players to go into the enemies rather than to just keep running away.

Another change made this week to combat the awkward backwards parkour was the addition of a bullet time mechanic into the game. This enabled players to use the movement system to maintain speed and build up points, and still deal damage to the horde of robots.

A multi-kill modifier was also another addition made this week, which can also be seen in the above GIF. This is to further encourage players to accumulate additional points through the use of skillful melee dashes and kiting their waves into tighter bunches correctly.

An announcer voice over was also added, to add a little more atmosphere and begin to put the building blocks for a pseudo back-story/player-character-motive to the game.

A final update was to modify the pistol magazine size upgrade in the store. Last week this upgrade upgraded the mag size by 10, which was a far too powerful upgrade early on.
The aim of these changes are to push the pistol into a weak early game sidearm and gradually make it more powerful in order to keep up with the enemies, or in the case of a skill-full player, surpass the enemy strength and begin to "snowball" with their own abilities.

This concludes the Devlogs for Dance Monkey Dance! We hope you enjoyed watching  an idea between four individuals turn into a real, playable prototype!