Welcome to another Juicy DevBlog. This week has been very good in terms of progress. At this rate, I'm hoping I would have enough traps implemented to move on to some actual game play! Any-who, this week I have managed to clean the dive animations up a little more (probably would need a few more tweaks here and there, but they are looking pretty good at the moment), as well as finishing off the slime trap (again, still needs tweaking). Not only that, but I have also managed to implement a new trap! A Bomb.. wait, can I say that out loud?... Oh well. The bomb was actually quite fun to implement. I was tossing up between a very unusual creature which sprouts up from the ground and explodes (similar to the creatures in 'Cup Head' (which is an amazing game by the way!)), but I felt that it didn't thematically work, so I stuck to the old school traditional bomb that you see in a lot of traditional 'Looney Tunes' cartoons. I had a lot of fun personalizing this trap, especially it's secondary animation after it falls from the sky. Speaking about the bomb, it didn't take me 50 attempts this time to think about how I wanted it to look, which was awesome! It only took me one design concept. Although, it did help having other dust particles that had already been implemented to use as references. I really did have a lot of fun creating this trap! Yes, the naming conventions aren't the greatest, but hey, I don't think I need to really touch this any more. Oh yes, and the frames are in reverse order from how they normally should look. So yes, I still need to tweak a few settings for the slime trap, but it's getting there. As you may have (or have not) noticed, the slime itself has changed a little. The outline is gone from both the ball and the puddle. I felt as if the outline on the puddle looked strange, and didn't really feel right, so I removed it. Once I removed the outline for the puddle, the ball then looked out of place, so I had also removed the outline from it. I still might change it again later, but we'll see. Not really much else to talk about this week. I have notice that things are getting easier to implement since I now have a rhythm for 2D animated assets, and what I need to do in order to apply them correctly to the specific function. Hopefully next week i can focus more on traps which are orientated towards mass area destruction. Something like spikes which appear everywhere in a certain area, or flames that shoot up from the ground.... yes, I can already picture something >:) Anyway, thanks again for reading. Again, if you have any feedback, I would love to hear from you, either on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Until next week, Thanks again!
0 Comments
Another week down and dusted! Man, time flies when you are having fun, right? Well anyway, this week I've managed to implement a few things which I'm 'fairly' happy with. In fact, almost all the things I mentioned last week I had managed to implement... Well, for some of it, I use the term 'Implement' lightly. I started out implementing the sludge trap but was stuck on a little snag... trigonometry. Yes, a flash back to my ol' schooling days.. Ah, how I do not miss those days. You're probably thinking "What does trigonometry have to do with this stupid little game?", right? Well, for the cannon to shoot out a ball of sludge, and eventually hit the ground, I need it to arc in a way which looks relatively nice, and not just have a straight line from one point to the other. That's where trigonometry comes into it. I did however manage to find some decent information on how to achieve this, but I've yet to implement it. So hopefully that will be next week's job. Also, I did manage to animate the sludge for when it hit's the ground which I'm happy with. It took me a few attempts to design the bubbles. The first attempt I designed the bubbles all at once and then animated them based on their next phase of animation... But that was too difficult, and didn't turn out the way I wanted them to, so I decided to redo them, and to only focus on one bubble at a time. Doing it this way allowed me to focus on adding a bit more "juice" to the one animation. Once I was happy with the animation for that bubble, I simply duplicated it a few more times, offset the animations, and moved them around the puddle. After completing majority of the Sludge trap, the only thing I needed to finish was the arc of the sludge ball... which, I didn't reeeaaalllyyy want to do at the time -I feel like that's a "weeks" job (for me anyway)-, so I decided to put that on the back burner for a little bit and focus on the character's "Dive" mechanic. This mechanic was super easy to complete since all I really needed to do was replace the animations for the movement to the dive, set the speed to a crazy number, then set the speed back to zero after a certain period of time. Sure, there were a few other things to consider such as not being able to move while diving, and making sure the player can still get hit by traps while diving, but those were just minor tweaks to this implementation. The longest and hardest part was designing the assets. I'm probably going to go back to these and clean them up a bit more, but overall, it's basically finished. So that wraps up this week's development Blog for Just Survive. Next week, I will "hopefully" have the sludge trap working, as well as cleaning up some of these dive animations. Besides that, I might look into implementing a new trap, and death animation. Until next week! Thanks again. Welcome to another exciting week of the Juicy Dev Blog, and what a week it has been! I can safely say that this week has been a lot more productive than the past week. I've managed to implement not only a fire trap, but also the Vertical Wall traps, AND the death for the player character when he touches the flames, YEW! So to start off, as I said, I had managed to push myself to implement the fire trap. Man, I tell you what, I have A LOT more respect for particle artist after going through this, that is for sure! It took me a solid few hours to even think of how I wanted my flames to look. Originally the flames didn't look like they were shooting out of a turret, so I changed them up to incorporate a bit more... 'force' to them. After a lot of trial and error, I finally managed to animate a decent flame suitable for the arena. Sure, it can be cleaned up a bit, but I think I will leave it as is until I'm ready to tackle that monster again. Once that was done, it was fairly simple to implement since I had previously implemented the 'electricity trap'. the only hurdle... well, when I say hurdle, i really mean time consuming... so... the only time consuming.... hurdle I encountered was separating the flames into multiple parts, so that when a trap passes through the middle of the flames, it didn't look like it was just one solid piece of particle. There was something else as well which I forgot to do, and that was to keep each frame a consistent size... Confused? Yeah, me too, So let me explain; When using Spine 2D to render out each frame of an asset, whether it be a trap or character animation, it renders the frames out, trimming the empty areas around it. So, when importing the frames into the game engine, I noticed that when playing the animation, it kept jumping around a lot, and I couldn't understand why... Until a few hours later. When I imported the frames, they jumped the actor around accommodating for the foreshortening of sizes, which was not ideal. So basically, you need each frame to be the same, consistent size. So, once I rendered the frames out from Spine, I then had to place them all into a single Photoshop file and trim them that way, THEN render each frame out again using the 'Export > Layers to files' option. So yeah, handy piece of information; make sure you keep your renders a consistent size! So once I had managed to implement the flame trap successfully, it was then time to test a new death animation. Again, it was pretty straight forward for this since I had previously implemented the death animation for the Electrocution. I have to say, creating this animation was pretty fun to do, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Once I had finished adding the death animation, it was then time to implement the wall window traps for each side of the arena. This was not really difficult, but again, tedious. I had to make sure that I was optimizing my assets to keep the performance in check, so I basically reused the same trap for both sides. This mean't I had to 'flip' the actor -100 along the X axes. At least with this type of trap I didn't have to separate the elements into smaller components. There was a lot of playing around with the anchor points for these elements and knowing which point would be best to base the pivot off, whether it was the top Left, or Center, or Bottom Right, it was tedious to say the least. There are still a few things to tweak with these 'side traps' but they are pretty close to being shipped. Below is a snippet of the traps in action as well as the burnt death animation, so I hope you enjoy! Again, any suggestions would be great! So that is it for this week. Again, very happy with the progress on this game. I hope next week I can implement a new trap. This trap I have in mind is more of like a sludge trap which pools on the floor and slows the player down. Really changing it up a bit keeps the development fresh and clean. Then, if I have time, I'll also start implementing the players 'leap' mechanic. So yeah, definitely getting there! Until next week! Thanks for reading! Hey everyone! Welcome to this weeks Juicy Dev. Unfortunately, there hasn't been that much 'dev' going on this week due to... well, life. Ah yes, the curve-ball which nobody see's coming. Yes, this week has been full of things other than development, which although I am sorry for the lack of content, it's expected since these things happen. Although I had other demands this week, I did manage to push forward in developing the 'fire' version of the wall trap... Well, an attempt at it any way. I realize that I actually suck at creating 2D fire. Not just fire, but a lot of other 2D animated particle effects which require spontaneous movements. I'll most likely have to plan this a little more carefully than just winging it for the following weeks. Maybe I'll move this to a long-term thing. We'll see. On the bright side, I did manage to implement the 'electrocution' death animation which I'm happy about. The sparks coming off the player are slightly off in some animations, but overall I'm satisfied with the progress. Besides that, I think that's really it this week. Super short, and apologies for the lack of content, but, unfortunately, these things happen. Next week I actually have some time off, so hopefully I will be able to make up for it. I'm hoping to get the fire trap sorted as well as a new trap implemented. I also hope that I will be able to sort out planting these wall traps around the arena rather than just at the top. many things to do, and not enough time. Regardless, I'll soldier on! Until next week! Thanks for reading. Welcome to another exciting week of Juicy development. This week was more focused on polish, rather than implementation. I mainly focused on creating new animations, and cleaning up old assets. I wasn't too happy with the old lightning that I produced earlier last week, so I decided to clean it up for this week. Not just that, but I've also added a new death for the character when he hits the 'Saw Blades'. It was quite interesting (and difficult) trying to come up with a reasonable, and yet gore-less death for him. I was tossing up between him bouncing around while he was... halved, then flop to the ground after a certain period of time. But I figured "Meh, that might be too long-winded", so I decided to keep it short and sweet. As I mentioned before, I updated the older 'lightning' traps animations to look a little more... refined. The next thing I plan to implement is the death animation for the lightning traps. I already have assets ready to go. Now it's just a matter of animating them. Really keen to see how these go. There is lightning there that is zapping around him, but you can't see it yet ;) Besides that, I did a few more minor adjustments to the Z-layering system. It seems to be working a lot nicer now which is good to see, but I'm sure there will be some improvements to make.
Nice quick dev update this week. Next week I hope to have the fire finally implemented as well as the death for the character when he touches the lightning traps. Until then. Thanks for reading! |
AuthorLindsay is a solo game developer, designing and creating games that he hopes all will enjoy. Archives
February 2020
Categories |