Week 09: Production Sprint 2 - 3

Hi peeps! 

Already our ninth devlog! We are nearing the end of the second sprint already so let’s show you all what happened this week. 

Background dancers are important

So considering we have some background assets it would be nice to let them move, no? 
Well that’s what we did. Take a look!

Seafloor and Arena have also been decorated with some lovely assets:

Some more shader work!

We created a vertex animation to make ropes and kelp sway nicely, to amplify that underwater effect:

And also our toon shader has been adapted for the player to be able to choose a color, using masks:

It's about the winner

Everyone agrees a winner deserves their crown, right? That’s why we made one!
Look at this happy lil’ goober and their reward.

Onto the next chapter

Next, we tried making some transitions between the scenes. These aren’t finalized nor implemented yet and are still fully up for debate.

Let it rise!

The developers improved and tweaked quite some stuff.

The rising of the arena could use some more attention, so we adjusted quite a few things. We decided that it would look cooler if the camera shifts upwards and looks down on the arena when it starts to rise. A shake effect on the camera was added because we feel like if the floor under your feet would start breaking, it would create some kind of turbulence don't you think? If you pay close attention, you can see that the background color shifts gradually to indicate that the arena is getting closer to the surface. The colors need a bit more tweaking, but this will look very nice.

We also made sure that certain behaviour gets activated at a certain phase to gradually increase the difficulty. For example, the hooks get activated on phase 3, the clam becomes more aggressive at phase 4, etc. . 

At a certain phase, when you get too close to the Clam, it will target you directly! So watch out! You’re a mean one, Mr. Clam…
We’re making sure that the Clam won’t target you when you’re behind it, ‘cause that would be a bit weird, no?

What's going on?

We also added some player feedback, because we think and care about you. When you get caught by a hook, an icon appears indicating you need to mash that button! For some reason the animation was a hell to implement, damn… but it looks nice though…

‘Tis Fishing Season!
That’s right, we celebrate the wonderful season whenever the hooks get activated. Isn’t that nice? The shrimp might disagree though…

The pearls also gradually change color now to make clear something is about to happen. And that something is an explosion! We agreed that the colors need some fine tuning, like increasing how bright they are and such, so in the polish phase we’ll pay some more attention to that.

Every Scene needs its unpaid background actors.

To fill the empty and boring back ground we decided to add a school of fish, a shark and a whale. But since just having them do nothing would look boring. We decided to incorporate flocking behavior. Currently there are two fish swing around within a bounding box and then the school of fish uses those two fish as targets and flock. For the shark its the same as those two fish except that instead of it being a target its a obstacle which the school of fish has to avoid. Lastly there is the big beautiful whale which is also an obstacle and extremely slow moving. It follows a different pattern as compared to the two fishes and the shark as instead of changing direction periodically it selects a target within the bounding box to swim towards. There is also banking so that when they turn they also lean in to the turn.

As this was my first time working on 3D flocking behavior I used a GitHub project as a base.                                       https://github.com/CristianQiu/Unity-Flocking-CPU-GPU?tab=readme-ov-file

How to pick up?

We already had the pick up feature for a while but were never really happy with it. We wanted something responsive but at the same time also look natural. So we opted for splitting the animation in 5 parts. Lowering -> Holding Low -> Pick Up -> Picked Up Idle -> Throw. This way the moment you hold down the pick up input an animation plays and when you are within range of the pearl then the pick up happens then if you release the input it throw. At any time before pick up if input is released it goes back to idle. This feels a lot more responsive and also looks good.

What's next?

"Bravo Six, activate final sprint." That's right, we're already starting on the last sprint: The Polish Sprint! **The crowd goes wild!**
We'll try to clean everything up, refine mechanics, animations, colors, etc.  to deliver a pleasing game to all of you. Wish us luck!