Me and Jonas have worked hard on player feedback this week since it is the one thing that is missing from our game. He worked with boss healthbar and feedback when getting hit.
Malin has worked with particle effects for even more feedback. We need to implement them next week.
I made two really crude in-game cinematics to enhance the player feedback when the avatar is killed and when teleporting. I havn’t made cinematics with C++ before and I didn’t bother making classes for it. I took the easy route and only used float timers for checking the progression of the cinematics.
So the principle goes something like this:
When the timer is above 2.0 seconds, update one thing.
Then when the timer is above 1.5 seconds, update another thing.
And so on until the timer reaches zero.
When the cinematic mode is turned on the avatar stops updating and the player loses all control over it.
Teleport to start cinematic.
If the player stands on a warppoint a certain time (currently five seconds) the teleport cinematic is started. While standing on the warppoint, tweezers comes down from the “sky” towards the warppoint. It picks up the avatar and places it at the vicinity of the first checkpoint, right below the starting room.
Here are the different parts of the teleportation cinematic.
The graphics for the tweezers is made by me, it’s a placeholder until we perhaps will get a real one from our graphic artists. They have much to do and the final week is approaching so it might not get changed.
Avatar death cinematic
Previously the avatar was instantly teleported to it’s checkpoint and play testers have given us feedback on it. There needed to be a short death scene and we have planned to have one since the start. Player feedback was a big deal that we hadn’t really thought enough about when designing the game. This part is starting to shape up now towards the end of the project!
When reaching zero life through getting hit by an enemy or their projectiles the avatar is now blown up. The head, body and weapon sprites are sent away in a random upward direction and the legs are left, just standing where the avatar died. The tweezers then makes it’s appearance again and sets a “new” avatar down at the current activated checkpoint. We plan to have a Malin’s particle effect with screws and cogwheels when the avatar dies.
We are also planning to make the legs work as a tombstone, to be left where the avatar died. Also the legs animation is frozen when dying because the player isn’t updated anymore. The plan is to keep the sprite in the frozen state and give it to a tombstone. The avatar then gets a new pair of legs.
Pieces of the avatar fly in upward random directions when dying.
We were planning on another round of play testing with friends and family but it is too late now since we will not be able to implement any suggestions in this final week that we have left. Instead we will release the final version of the game when the course is ended. I will probably put a link to it here on the blog next Friday.
tomaslindell 
Hello, I was assigned to comment on your blog this week.
Now this is a blog in my taste, plenty of images, plenty of of posts and good ones at that. I can easily say that your blog is the best one I’ve commented on so far. The downside of this is that it’s always harder to comment on a good blog than a bad but here i go.
First of all i liked how you separated your post into a status update over your group’s progress, your own work and then two smaller segments about each artifact. It really helps making the text easier to read.
I feel like you could have elaborated on the animation mechanics a bit. I found it unclear the first time reading through what you meant by “update an object” i read it as “updates the frames every 2 seconds” which just didn’t make sense. That being said that is a great way of making animations in a simple way.
It’s great that you have taken input from the players and they are right, giving feedback when being killed is a very important part of game. For example, our game might end up not having it and going from game to YOU DIED! in no time isn’t as “satisfying” way to die. Just make sure the flying parts dosen’t go flying indefinetley after being launched as that could create some weird moments if they pass the area where the new character is. Or let them do, it might be a neat thing. Just be wary of memory leaks which can easily be an issue with particles and flying things.
Anyways, keep up the great blog.
-Herman.