One week done, one more week to go! We are halfway through the polish sprint now, with plenty of polishing done, but a whole bunch more still ahead of us.

Art: General

This week, we focused on making the game environment feel more dynamic, immersive, and responsive. To bring more life to the outdoor areas, we added pigeons with simple animations, as well as stylized clouds in the background of the end screen for additional visual polish. Bushes now react to wind using a pixel offset shader, which gives the scene a more natural and responsive look.

We also implemented visual indicators to improve player feedback and clarify the guard’s behavior. A question mark appears when the guard is searching or looking around, and an exclamation mark pops up when he spots the player. These small but effective cues make AI states more readable during gameplay.

To improve the game's presentation, we created a new title screen that features the museum wall and street, where raccoons endlessly flee from the guard in a fun looping animation. On the UI side, we added a timer pop-up animation at the start of each level, giving players a moment to orient themselves. The same animation is used to mark the start of the end phase, adding a sense of urgency.

We made significant project cleanup efforts, reorganizing the level outliner, content browser, and art asset folders to streamline development and improve maintainability.

In terms of gameplay content, we finalized a system to assign randomized metal values—gold, silver, or bronze—to lootable items, supporting more dynamic scoring. We also addressed an issue with unwanted white outlines around UI elements by replacing problematic PNGs with Targa files, resulting in cleaner transparency.

Finally, we enhanced environmental storytelling by turning last week’s car model into a moving blueprint with working headlights, and retextured it into a police variant that appears during the game’s final moments, prompting players to scatter and escape