Hello penguins!

As always, we start with the art: in this first week of the polish sprint we reworked the atlas texture map and added a wood texture. If you complete the game, you will arrive at the penguin castle. The castle has snow on the roofs and got new textures.

We changed small things/ issues to the puzzles and play tested the levels a lot to find underlying problems.

The UI is now more or less complete! No more placeholders, all the buttons are now in the place where they're supposed to be. We also now have a logo for Arctic Dash, which is visible in the menu screen.

Apart from that, we fixed the decoration prefabs, as they were continuously disappearing in our scenes.

The trees are starting to move! To make our gameworld feel a little less static, we animated the trees to sway from side to side.

<div style="width:100%;height:0px;position:relative;padding-bottom:56.919%;"><iframe src="https://streamable.com/e/phtu2h" frameborder="0" width="100%" height="100%" allowfullscreen style="width:100%;height:100%;position:absolute;left:0px;top:0px;overflow:hidden;"></iframe></div>

Now, what our programmers were up to:

We made the snowflake indicators light up and animated according to the state of the triggers connected to them

Fixed the control pop-up functionality. Originally it was made very quickly and the code wasn't very good. This has now been reworked and functions a lot smarter now. The player has 2 buttons that can pop-up, in the previous version this gave some issues, but by reworking it, those issues were dealt with.

Based on some player feedback, the controls for the breaking of the ice and the sliding are switched. The ice breaking is now a face button, which some people thought would be better for spamming. The sliding gives you a speed boost, so it would work better on the trigger.

Changed some of the interactable things in the game. When the levers are triggered are attached to a gate or a bridge, and it opens, they will stay green and down. This is to indicate to the player that the interaction has worked. The pressure plate is the other thing that I worked on. Previously it could get triggered if a mine fell on top of it. This wasn't something we wanted to happen, so now there is a check in place to make sure that only a player or a crate can push down on a pressure plate. A big thing that we still need to work on is player feedback.

One thing for that is controller rumble. We implemented the rumble to happen when something big happens (gate opening, bridge lowering, explosion). This rumble is configurable in intensity and in duration, making it so that it can be used for anything.

Lastly we worked on the different game modes. We got some feedback that it would be useful to have a 2 versions of the game. 1 version is the full game. This is how we envision it to be played, should we release it. The other version is a demo version. This is a smaller versions of the game with less platforms. This can be useful when we have to show of our game to other people and don't want it to take a long time for them to see the end.

That's it from us this week, we have one more week left of polish, and then officially done with the game!
Hopefully we can push it to it's best version :)

Thanks for reading!