I’ve been toying around in the background with the idea of remaking one of my earlier games, Eviction Novice, and I am basically just giving in to my strong desire to have tweened UI right now.
Ultimately, though, my aim with this project is to show how much I’ve improved in roughly a year. Even if this project is incredibly bare-bones right about now, I’ve already been making some major improvements when it comes to presentation.
This game will also probably have environments that aren’t just stretched Unity cubes for the ground. That’d be neat.
Minor update to the game: there’s now half a second of delay between death and respawn!
It’s an incredibly minor feature (and this does technically make it
harder to speedrun), but in the end we decided that it would be better
for the game’s feel to give the player time to process the fact that
they’ve died in the first place.
So it’s no secret that we have a dog you can pet in our game, but did you know we have SIX dogs you can pet in our game???
This here’s a little secret room that you can only get to if you get an S rank on all of the levels in the game. Why? Because if you get an S rank, you get a little box of dog treats.
If you get enough dog treats, the dog out front will unlock the door for you and let you pass.
The significance of these five dogs is that these dogs represent all the devs working on this game. I’m the dog on the very left and I’m the cutest one.
Of course, the fact that we’re working on the secret dev room means that progress is going great on the rest of the levels! We’ve got a whopping twelve levels now, if you count the tutorial and end boss.
I’m
working on an opening cutscene for the game that I think we’re now
re-renaming back to Blink Blade? Whatever the technicals are, I would
like to stress how glad I am that the Unity Timeline exists, because I
just found out that it’s a thing I have access to and I really wish I’d
known about it earlier.
The trickiest part about making the
cutscene so far is making the characters actually move around (both
characters end up walking off screen) - I ended up cutting corners and
just making their in-game transforms move as a part of custom
animations, even if it may have been more robust to set a function for
them to move horizontally and activate it via code. This is the only
place I’m actually going to be doing such a thing, and I doubt anybody’s
really going to be able to tell in the final game.
(note: these animations are unpolished and unfinished and won’t necessarily represent the final product!)
We’ve got two weeks until the deadline for beta, and things are starting to shift into focusing on the final boss battle that is probably definitely going to make it into the game, hopefully. The boss is going to go through a whole bunch of different gameplay phases, and to signify that, we decided to have some real twisted fun with his head.
Right now, there’s not much happening with his body, which definitely does need to be addressed soon, but with beta so close we’re focusing on getting something functional in over something that looks nice for the time being. Sprite sheets can be edited pretty easily once they’re imported into Unity, anyhow.
Introducing: the IMP. This li’l troublemaker will summon balls of energy (probably HAUNTED and CURSED energy) and fire it at you wherever you’re standing at the time. I’ve compiled a quick little before and after we added in the proper animation and effects.
There’s three parts to the “summoning” animation: the surrounding particles, the charging orb and the circular flash for the actual shot.
We played around with the colours for this animation quite a bit. While we initially considered red eyes for the chanting imp, we figured it might clash a little too much with the rest of his red body and especially outline, and decided to go for a bright yellow instead. Originally, the chanting imp had yellow surrounding particles for this animation.
However, we decided that the discrepancy between the yellow particles and the red shot were a little too much, and so we changed the particles to be more of a light red to match.
The imp’s charge time is a variable that we can change, but as much as I’m embarrassed to admit it, the animation is vaguely set in stone - what I mean by that is that the growing orb while the imp is charging is a single-particle burst with a lifetime. The lifetime can be changed, but it isn’t automatically calculated or anything.
Thankfully though, the muzzle flash(?) for the bullet shot is just spawned as soon as the bullet itself is spawned, so it HAS to be in time with it. This is also the source of the sound effect, so that the sound gets quieter if the player is further away. Given that right now, the imps are always firing, even when way off screen, this is definitely for the best.
Update to gravity particle systems: they’re no longer constant, because we decided that we only really need to give that visual spice when gravity flips as opposed to just. Constantly. All the time. They’re also way faster now, so there’s less of a delay when the flip occurs.
Also worth noting, we’ve got gravity flipping in the game! We wanted to make it even clearer than it already would be if we just saw the player running along the ceiling, so I got to work on some minor particle effects. These colours probably definitely aren’t final, but I did want to show that I intend to play with a colour dichotomy as well as a difference in direction.
Now that I think about it, maybe changing the particles to little arrows pointing up/down wouldn’t be the worst idea to make the idea even more colour-blind… I’ll play around with that and see how things go.