Hello world! Today, a lot of small changes were made to the HIRT game to tackle some of the issues the game had in the past. As we are getting closer to our next exhibition, the Herofest in Bern, some fixes for minor bugs and some adaptions for the usability have demanded implementation:

• We removed an unlucky and unintended way of dying. A sheep carried by a player could fall on his head and kill him if he would turn into a sheep while standing still. Now the sheep gets dropped as it should and proceeds to being angry at the player.
• We added a first draft of controller stick support in the UI. Players can now switch tournament modes and round counts with the joystick, not just with the D-Pad alone.
• Player sheep who are ramming and lose their wool (-> become human) now definitely stop the ramming and lose the ability to kill another player. There was a loophole in the code before, now this is fixed. Players exiting the ramming still move forward though, so it can still be used as a means of transportation over the map, wooo
• Sheep caught by players while ramming now display the right animation of being held
• Sheep caught by players after they rammed are carried with the right offset now. Before there was an issue with this.
• The ramming power UI displays now the right amount of power even after the player has used a different weapon. There used to be a bug which did not allow to display this in a reliable manner.
• We made the death and hit confirm UI font larger to ensure readability.
• The mighty windhorn now blows off the hats of shepherds if you hit the poor fellas with it. Still no damage effect, just a naked head.
• Last week, we also invested some time into the looks of our sheep brawler. We created high detail models of some environment pieces (rocks, walls) and the prepared those to be fit for the game by baking normal maps and making low-res model versions of it.