Week 08: Production Sprint 2 - 2

Hello beautiful party people!  
Another day, another devlog.

Lookin' clean!

Like we said last week, a lot of things would be improved on. Well, here we are! Firstly the hook has a lovely texture now! 

As good as this model looks static, we decided it would be even better if there was a little movement on the rope. But the dev side will be able to explain way better what exactly is going on under the hood. 

The animations for the struggle of the shrimp when it’s caught on the hook has been made and implemented.

The pick up animation is also in the works of being cleaned up and split for better ease of use.

We also improved on the animations for the clam when it shoots pearls at the player.

It's a Party-cle!

More particle effects have been made, to add more player feedback:

The particle for when the character is struggling to get off the hook:

Hook trail particle:

The particle that shows where the hook is going to fall:

We also did a bit of polishing on the VFX part - added bubbles to the pearl explosion and more layering to the punching particle:

Taking care of the environment

Our background is looking a bit empty, let’s change that! We’ve textured these beautiful models and they’re ready to be added to our game!

We’ve also decided to scale up the arena a bit, giving our players even more breathing room. (even though we’re underwater) The arena also has gotten its depth back, and it has been split up into multiple parts. Ready for DESTRUCTION!

Getting your sprites right

And now for a tedious and quite annoying part ://. All our previous used UI assets we’re in the wrong file type; png’s and jpegs. We had to change this to .tga for images with transparancy and .png for image with no transparancy. This took quite a while but everything got sorted and looks better than ever!

As we’re nearing the end of production it’s time for some polishing! The in-game HUD was looking a bit flat so we’ve started adding a bit of detail. Still a long way to go!

Behold! Particles...

The developers also got to implement the beautiful particles that the artists made. “Behold! My stuff.”:

The aim particle is visible when the hook is coming down:

There’s also an (shr)impact particle in there! See what I did there? This was a little bit tricky to get right. The particle had to spawn where the hit had landed, but since we’re working with colliders, we didn’t receive a ‘hitpoint’. What we did to solve this was to get the nearest point on the opponent colliders based on which hand of the player was punching. (The particle will become more noticeable next week)

When a player gets caught by a hook, the shrimp is fighting for its life to escape! As you can clearly see:

For the hooks it is important to be able to enable and disable them smoothly. This means when the hooks are getting disabled, they shouldn’t just disappear. We made sure that all the hooks, in whichever state they are, get reeled in towards the ocean’s surface. Et voila!

Breaking the Environment

We also implemented the new awesome looking arena. Who wouldn’t want to live here? If there wasn’t a giant, aggressive clam shooting exploding pearls at you…

I don’t know if we told you already, but the Clam is more dangerous than ever! Its pearls can destroy the arena (and its inhabitants)! When the layers would break off, the arena ‘rises’. We trick the human eye by moving the background down instead. Also the camera movement helps a little, although this could use some more tweaking.

 The Clam also lets you know when it’s going to ruin your life now, which is pretty cool if you ask me…

Camera shake

Let's add some feedback to the camera! Now when you die the camera shakes a bit to emphasize the event. The way it works allows you to easily add camera shake to all kinds of other events in the game.

What's next?

Next week is the last week of production! **The crowd mumbles in shock.** But no need to worry, we are ready to give it our all, one last time. We definitely need to add sounds to really liven up the feeling of the game. The arena will break and rise (sounds kinda poetic), gameplay will balance and UI will make everthing clear. After that, we can start the Polish Sprint, but that's another story. See ya next time!