Hello fellow penguins,

It's the last week of our polish sprint! Making sure every small issue is fixed, doing small tweaks to the materials, balancing the difficulty level of the boss... It was a hectic week, but we made it.

We playtested our game a lot this week. We had new people and people who've played our previous builds playtest. We got a lot of valuable feedback and implemented it. We tweaked the levels, moved level decoration where needed, changed groundplane shapes...

And now we'll try and list all of the changes we've made this week.. It's bound to be a long post, so please bear with us 🐻‍❄️

We polished the boss fight, adding a short cutscene and a smooth cinematic pan to the gameplay!

To make it easier for the player if a crate needs to be placed in the water or on the terrain we created different boxes: boxes that need to be placed on pressure plates are metal and will sink in the water, boxes that need to be placed in the water have a wood texture and will float while placed correctly.

The gate doesn't clip through the floor anymore, but instead lowers into a trim mesh. 

A reworked Penguin rig with hand adjusted vertex weights has been implemented, resulting in much more polished animations.

The animation for the trees is now by default a lot less dramatic, and we have a stronger swaying animation for when the trees get hit by the wind of the fan.

We also made a handpainted skybox material, so that when the camera shifts for the boss fight and the castle, you have a nice view of the sky (see thumbnail). The snowflake material has been updated to make its lighting up more visible. The polar bear also has a death animation now.

We added an icon for our game, displaying a cute penguin face. 

VFX

We polished some vfx and added some new ones to improve player feedback.

We got a little bit too enthousiastic and created some sounds ourselves. Feel free to search for them in our game.

We've added an option in the editor to specify a volume where a crate must be dropped in a level, so that we can automatically respawn it if placed in the wrong spot so player don't get stuck.

The changes we've them during the polish phase this week are really too much to list, but we'll do our best!
We made the penguin feel more alive, as well as the UI feel more responsive, by changing the UI popup system and adding a dynamic head snapping functionality to the penguin. We also added a new footstep clouds vfx!

We reworked the sliding mechanics, animations, and even added a new VFX to visualize the speedy motion!

The boss attacks were were refined visually, and made more challenging.

We fixed most of the snowball bugs in the game. Players can no longer interact with other objects while holding a snowball. Also, when a player died while holding a snowball, they respawned still holding it and in some cases that could break the game. We also fixed an issue with dying. When a player respawned in a block of ice, they could still get hit and die again. This was very unfair to the player, since they can't dodge attacks while stuck in an ice block. An icon was made for the build file of our game. We reworked the game over, adding the options to go back to the main menu or quit. We added some more sounds and the ambient music. Finally we worked a lot on the camera system. The camera now stops running away while the players are solving the puzzles. During playtesting, we noticed that players can take some time solving a puzzle. It was unfair to them that the camera moved across the puzzle before they could solve it. The boss fight also required a new camera to be implemented. For the castle level, we used the same camera as the boss level, only now it had to follow the players. We made it so that it always stayed a bit behind the player who is the farthest away from the castle.

Last but not least - we implemented nooting into the game in an homage to our beloved childhood claymation show Pingu.

We've sure come a long whole way since taking on this project. We've learned a lot and had heaps of fun creating this cute game, and we are now proud to present to you: Arctic Dash!

Our heartfelt gratitude goes to the entire team and our supervisors, Stijn and Bert for their honest, harsh but fair, and most of all - invaluable feedback.

Thanks for the support!

The penguin team 🐧📢 *Noot noot!*