Heya pizza lovers,

This is it, the final devlog we'll ever write for this amazing project. It's been something else! With many sleepless nights and some good old last minute polish changes, we are here one last time to present to you the final build of Speedzza.

Here we go!

The final changes

The biggest thing we changed in polish was the way the indicaters look and work. It was hard to tell where you needed to go in the previous build, so we made a massive upgrade to the system by implementing the icons instead of the old, frankly ugly lines which connected you to your target. Now we have not one, but two beautifull icons to indicate exactly where you should be heading. The first one is the pizza location, which starts pointing at the courier after pickup, so that the other players know where he is driving, The second pointer is the location of delivery, which is the only indicator for the courier and a secondary indicator for the other players. You can descide to go straight for the poor guy, or you can choose to intercept him on the way to the delivery point.

Next up is the speedboost upgrade. The speedboost always felt a bit off.. but no longer! We updated the feel, look and power of the boost by adding enough force to get a lot of distance covered, but keep it just within range to be able to control where you are going. Obviously we then matched the animation duration to the duration of the boost perfectly. Now going out of your way to pick one up, is often worth the extra disctance.

We then updated some collisions which were a bit annoying to drive into. We removed the collision on smaller unbreakable objects completely, so that the player never gets stuck in between trees and streetlanterns EVER again. Playing the game now feels way smoother than before, without removing the crucial collisions. Tweaking this was a major improvement on the expierence of navigating the map.

Next up is the UI overhaul. We felt like the UI could use a little more love. We changed most of the icons to be less of the IN-YOUR-FACE type kind of icons. Everything is way more subtle, slick and smooth. The biggest changes being the money icon, the screen divider and the powerup slot. 

After that we made some changes to the menu. Now with moving backgrounds instead of a screenshot or a video, which delivers a way more dynamic experience than simply waiting in a flat menu. The player now has a feeling that it is a living, breathing city, with moving environmental pieces upon simply being in the startscreen. The same goes for the endscreen.

We even had time to squash a few bugs in the game. We fixed the endscreen amount of money display, an odd invulnerability glitch when stealing pizzas and some other little critters that messed with our roundsystem and pickup/delivery mechanics. We also enabled our credits screen.

Some emitters in the map were acting up and not deleting themselves when we desired, so we updated those and used a small script to time the firehydrant particle to stop after about 5 seconds.

The sides of the map were filled up with builldings, that lose saturation the further away from the map they are. These saturation changes were easily done with the shader we made to adjust the other materials to better match the artbible. Now the map has a clear separation between interactables and sheer static objects.

The map still felt a bit empty sometimes, so we descided to mix some things up in there. We added a second park, as we noticed it being super fun to drive through. Then we added waaaaay more of our destructible props in the map, like fences and garbage cans. These are all fun to hit or to take a shortcut through by smashing them out of your way. The map has a few new construction sites and a whole bunch of roadblocks, which are just begging to be smashed. It is an overall upgrade to the existing map and most of all, a fun one.

In conclusion

The game has come a long way and while we are sad that we did not have the time to implement every feature we would have wanted for the final product, we were able to effectively boil down our concept to the elements it needed to feel fun. The main mechanic, the destruction, the speedboosts and the moving elements in the environment make it a fun, quickshot game. The soundeffects are very intuitive and add a lot to the way the game is played, as soundqueues help indicate danger, objectives and interaction.

 While we always can say that it could be more or it could be better, we sure as hell enjoyed playing the full build. It's competive, it's fast paced, it's stupid funny, it's Speedzza. All  supported by our absolute JAM of a main theme.

We can finally, proudly present to you, our final build.

 Leave your thoughts in a comment and give us a fair rating! We would love to hear your feedback on our project.

Catch you all in the city!

With love,

The pizza lovers supreme