Week 05: Production Sprint 1 - 2

Hello peeps, another devlog, yey!

It's the second week of production and it has been a very productive one. Huzzah!

Slay the Beast!

Starting with the art side of things. 

A monster looms in the distance, its name, the character rig. Dun dun duuuun… Anyways, seriously now, our team does not have any animators so any kind of animation would be a challenge. Considering we made our main character a shrimp, we do not have a need for a humanoid character rig. It’s also not easy to find resources online because that rig needed to be specific to our needs. That's why we decided, with our limited rigging knowledge, to make that ourselves. It was a daunting task but we managed to complete it nonetheless!

Due to some scaling issues, we had to re-rig the Clam, but no bummer, the rig is now finished!

Looking like a Model

We also finalized the texture for our enemy, the clam, and worked on the visuals of our upstream water current:

Lastly, we have started on the plants and other assets in the asset pack! With some nice base coloring they’re looking to be added to the arena real soon.

Here, catch!

Let’s make the game a little bit more fun, shall we?

Having pearls that just roll around, doesn’t seem fun. So what if they explode in your opponent's face? To make them explode, we temporarily visualized the timer of the pearl by gradually becoming more red, but later we replaced that by the texture. Once the timer is done, they go kaboom. Once they go kaboom, the players get knocked back if they find themselves in a certain radius of the explosion. Since we made the knockback tracker last week, we can easily apply this force which will take the knockback multiplier into account. This then gets automatically adjusted on the HUD. Neat, right? Even though you can’t hear it we have also added an explosion sound where the volume differs depending on how close a player is. Since it’s a couch co-op this means the closest of the two.

If you want to make sure a pearl explodes in your opponent’s face, you’ll need a way to throw those pearls. Some time ago, we decided that we should pick up items when holding the left trigger. Once you release, the pearl will be shot forward. We made the player move slower when they pick up a pearl to create the feeling that the pearls are heavy for the shrimp. This adds a nice touch. 

It's a controller player! That's cheating!

We quickly realised that we would need some guidance to aim, since this game is for beginners and also because of the perspective in this game. Let’s implement aim assist! This article (Simple Aim Assist) helped us a lot, so we’d like to give a huge shoutout. The way it works:

• It calculates the angle between your forward direction and the direction to the target.
• Then, it checks whether the angle is smaller than the max angle you’ve chosen.
• If it is smaller, it will calculate a guidance value based on a curve.
• That value will be used to interpolate between your current direction and the direction to the target. It guides towards the target.

So, if your max angle is 30 and your current angle to the target is 15, you’ll evaluate and extract the corresponding value to 15/30 (= 0.5) on the curve. The larger your current angle, the smaller the guidance will be.

When everything is done correctly, you should be able to hit your targets more easily!

Now that we can pick up and throw pearls, we can make the Clam shut up! Yay! We made sure that, when you throw a pearl at it, it will also explode in its face as well! Hell yeah! Once you do, the Clam will close and stop shooting pearls for a moment, but after a while, it will reawaken again and continue committing safety violations. The bastard…

It's alive!

We tried to give the pearls a little shake to visualize them increasing their stage. Let’s just say we lost a lot of time on figuring out when certain offsets should be what.

Right now, we apply the shake by changing the position… This is causing a lot of issues. Next week we’ll look into how we can make this better and maybe we’ll use another type of implementation. Maybe we can use forces instead. Further investigation required! As you can see: not everything goes smoothly, but we’ll get there : ).

That looks Painful

A main part of the game is punching your opponent in the face but until now we haven’t actually shown that in action yet. Well this week we finally added punching! Pressing the right trigger throws a jab with which you can try and knock your opponent off the map.

We use a keyframe system in the animations so that the punch feels like it connects at the right time and forces aren’t applied prematurely. The punches also make use of the knockback multiplier system from last week so the more you hit your opponent the further they’ll fly.

Look what you're doing!

Last week we also had a temporary UI to visualise the players multiplier and lives. Well this week we finished the art for the hud and hooked that up to the code. Look at the little guys up there, aren’t they cute?

Another UI change this week is the dash cooldown. Last week it was quite unclear when your dash was up so this week we added a little radial indicator to show you that it is on cooldown. Now you can dash all over the place without having to spam the button. We have also implemented a dash particle to simulate the dashing effect.

Don't get carried away!

This week, we also focused on adding the water currents in our game. The water currents follow along the path of a unity spline to add curvature to the current. These splines are added to the spline container so that we can premake several paths around the map. We can adjust parameters like the current’s strength, the effect radius, and how often the current switches between different splines. During gameplay, the system continuously applies forces to objects within the effect radius based on the direction of the current spline. This dynamic switching of splines ensures that the water currents are always changing to add challenge for the players. Currently we have simply two premade but we will work on adding as many as possible so that the player can’t just predict where the current will be next.

To visualize these water currents in the game (since an invisible water current is quite literally OP), we implemented a particle system that represents the water flow. Back in the prototype phase, this was done with bubbles but now it looks like a propper current. Just like how the current affects the object it also should make the particles flow along the path. This was not as easy but we made it work albeit not polished yet.