Hey everyone! And welcome to this weeks Juicy Dev! Sooooo... remember last week how I said I wanted to start working on the events and the score system... Well, I've made a slight detour from that plan, and decided to create one more trap. I felt while designing these events, that there was still a lack of traps. So, after a bit of thinking, I decided to implement a trap which covered more of the ground, the rolling trap! Below is short video of what it looks like. I had fun developing this trap, especially when it drops in from the stands. Originally I wanted the roller to appear out of the wall, but I think it would have been obstructive and strange to have a door open while a wall trap occupied that area, so instead, I made them fall into the arena. After I had developed this trap, I thought about adding in power-ups to make it more interesting then just avoiding obstacles. I'm still tossing up whether or not to have them represent the same colors, or have them different. I think different colors are better since they can be easily identified, but I'll get some feedback from this. I also thought about adding "power-downs", pick-ups which hinder the player. This, to me, added some difficult choices to the player; whether stepping over the power-down and occupy a safe position, or die. But, I think, power-downs aren't really a 'favorable' game design decision, so I may not even include them in the final build, we'll see. Overall, I thought about how the events would work and what possible combinations I could implement, but I think I will have more of a grasp on it next week for you all, so until then, Thanks for reading!
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Welcome to another Juicy DevBlog, with your host, yours truly! This week has been a hectic week for me with other real life happening going on, so I didn't get to do as much on the game as I would have liked. However, I did finish what I said last week about the death animations, thank god! I didn't really have much troubles implementing these death animation for both the bomb and the spike, it was more the case of tedious. For the spike animation, I had to spawn in the new animations for the character, then spawn the sword and shield above the screen out of the way, then kill the player. That way, The shield and sword would fall after 1 second or so. I had a similar set up for the bomb, but minus the character. The character basically blows up, so I didn't have to worry about that. As you can see below, I had implemented a few more 'juicy' effects to the bomb such as after burn on the ground. Let me know what you all think! And here are some more animations to help satisfy that craving. And here is the death animation for the spike. After that, I place everything back into the scene to see how it looks. I've yet to implement the difficulty level/ progression, so hopefully that will come soon. I may add in a few more traps here and there to add a bit more variety, but I think it is time to start adding in some high scores and real game footage. Next week I hope to fix a few small visual bugs as well as programming bugs, but I mainly want to implement the high score mechanic. Luckily enough I will be on holidays in a weeks time, so I should have a lot more time to invest into this. Again, any suggestions would be awesome! Until next time! Thanks for reading! Another week down and dusted... Man, I should be nearing completion by now right? Aren't most mobile games like a two week turn around, or something? Oh well, I'm going to blame it on solo development. This week hasn't been too much in terms of progression. I have managed to implement a new trap as well as testing a few death animations (which are still yet to be polished). I'm pretty happy with the progress of how these traps are coming a long, but I'm not really sure to do with them. Basically- and yes, I should have fleshed this out before, but I haven't, silly me- I'm tossing up between groups trap events, or single trap events. From looking at this weeks animation video, I've come to really enjoy playing with a large number of the same trap all at once over a period of time rather than single traps becoming inclusive over a period of time. Maybe that is where I start to deviate from in terms of gameplay? Either way I will be testing them both to see how good the game really 'feels'. If it feels better with progressive trap inclusion then I'll stick to that, otherwise, I might go down the other route, maybe? Or, another spanner, why not both? I'll really have to nut this out in the coming weeks. I'm hoping to finish off these traps as well as the death animations so that I can start to focus on the game play and different scene transitions. Anyway, below is a snapshot of what I have done so far. Any suggestion would be great! This patch of dust is when the player gets spiked in the butt. He will rocket off screen leaving this dust effect behind. And the final result of this trap. Again, I didn't really have much issue implementing this trap. I did however have issues with the collision (which I can't remember if I had mentioned it or not in the past), but basically if the player is standing stationary when the traps appears, nothing happens due to the 'collision' not technically passing through the player. So instead, I set the collision detection through the update to check whether or not the player is in that spot or not. If they are, then kill the player, otherwise, don't do anything. Next week i hope to successfully implement the death animations for both the bomb and the spike trap. Until next week, Thanks for reading! 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! 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. |
AuthorLindsay is a solo game developer, designing and creating games that he hopes all will enjoy. Archives
February 2020
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