Hello and welcome back to another Devlog of "The Backrooms"! 

This week marks the final week of production, which means, that we won't be adding any new features from next week onwards.
Thus, this weeks focus was mainly on adding the remaining features we definitely wanted to have in our game.

Sadly, the map-generation, we had planned in the beginning, would be way too time-intensive for us to still implement. So we decided against the map-generation and for a fixed level. This way, we were able to focus on optimizing the existing mechanics and implementing the last, missing ones. 

What did we work on?

RFX

Last week, we started working on RFX and continued doing so in this week. One very important RFX for player-feedback is the blood, when a human will be killed by the player.  Sadly, it can't yet be seen ingame, because the humans currently de-spawn instantly, when they are killed.

The priests can also be killed, but die a bit differently - they dissolve into dust, which will look like this:

As we all know, the priests can do more than just die - they can also attack the play with their prayers! We already have a praying animation, but since it isn't that obvious, we also decided to add RFX for the Priest while he is praying. This way, the player will see where the damage to the bloodmeter is coming from and who to kill first:

Last week, we already had the Slime-Drops RFX for the Protagonist, which increases, the higher the Bloodmeter-Tier is. This week we added to it, by including a Slime Trail on the floor:

Audio

In the last weeks, we kept on working on different Audio Effects and Background Sounds for "The Backrooms". This week, we started implementing them into the game, which already has a huuuge impact on the atmosphere. 
It isn't possible to embed these effects in this Devlog, so I can only remind and recommend you to download the newest version and try it for yourself! :) (New Version every Tuesday)

UI

Last week, we started working on the UI, but some parts were still missing - including the leaderboard and score system. The graphics for those parts and the Pause-Menu were created this week, as you can see in the following pictures: 

Leveldesign

Since we decided to drop the map generation, we had to expand and decorate the current Level. Part of this is not only adding the 3D Assets we created in the previous weeks, but also Decals and Lighting.

The first step was to add more empty rooms to the already existing ones:

After that we filled those empty rooms with Assets and added Lights. Currently, all those lights are set to "static" which means, they can't be changed while the game is running. Thus, our mechanic with destroying the generators and turning of the lights won't work, and the protagonist doesn't throw any spooky shadows onto the walls. The reasion for this is, that if we change the lights to "stationary", which would allow us these features, some things in the code cause them to become either really bright or really dark. Until we have fixed these issues in the next week, we will keep static lights, so that the game stays playable and won't be completely black or white.

Features

One of the features we added in this week, is the wall phasing. As soon as your bloodmeter is high enough, this feature will unlock and certain walls will become "phaseable", which means you can dash through them. 
To make it visible to the player, that a wall is phasable, we needed a different texture for them:

In the following gif, you can see how the feature looks ingame, though the wall in there is still having an older placeholder texture, so please don't let it confuse you:

The other mechanic we worked on, were the doors, which can be closed by the player to trap the NPCs inside a room and stop them from running away. (Currently, the doors are not big enough to cover the whole gap in the wall, but we will obviously fix that in the next week.)

Where do we go from here?

Next week, the "Polish-Sprint" is starting. As mentioned previously, this means we won't be able to add any new features and have to focus solely on improving the existing ones - whether it is programming-wise or on the art side. 
Some things we will be working on are for example the instantly de-spawning humans. We will change it, so that they will be visible a bit longer and the blood RFX and death animation have time to be visible. We will also add some more feedback and improvemts to the UI / HUD and polish some of the RFX.

Thank you for stopping by and don't forget to try out the game yourself! ;)

See you next week!