Devlog 6: More mechanic work

Hello and welcome back to our (almost) weekly devlog! It's been a while though, hasn't it? ;) The Easter Holiday was long but well deserved.

However, we are now back to work and ready to deliver! This week we continued working on our tasks and with them completed, the first sprint of production is now over!

Art

Jens

I have been continuing the cannon model and unwrapping process for the penguin shooter.

I have also been doing some more research about cell fracturing for the playing field and how to make it a bit more controllable because i don't seem to be getting the desired results with the blender cell fracture addon. more on that next Devlog.

I've also been managing the projects naming conventions to check which ones were missing their postfixes and what not. 

Anyway, here are some fun facts about penguins:

• There are 18 species of penguin.
• Penguins originated in Australia.
• A group of penguins in the water is called a raft but on land they're called a waddle.

Agne

I have spent some more times on making polished materials and applying them to the game arena. I started from scratch but i still kept my prototype materials on the side as inspiration. This time, I immediately focused on keeping my colors muted and my shapes not too visible. I found an old mario party minigame that had some really good ice, not too noisy but still semi realistic, and I tried to create something similar.
This was my inspiration:

This was my result:

I also made a snow material to layer on the map with some vertex painting. It took a bit of tweaking with values but eventually it came out pretty nicely, it blends well with the ice material. 


I  also  made some changes on the old vfx i made following the feedback of my teammates. Again, just a matter of fixing some colors and clipping through terrain.

Coding

Reeling Mechanic: One object targeted by many

Ioana

I started this week of production by addressing one important issue in our main mechanic: how can we tell that an object is being targeted by more than one person? How do I know who I'm targeting if that reelable object is already being targeted by someone else?

Just to summarize, the old way of showing targeting icons used to look something like this (with the target icon having the same color of the penguin doing the targeting):

So what happened if two reelers were pointing at the same object? I don't know, they were probably unclearly overlapping.

Which is why I decided to design it differently. Know how the guys in Elden Ring did it? Yes, a glowing orb with the depth buffer disabled.

My design is very similar, but the orb is smoky and colored the same way as the player. 

So how does that fix the issue? Well, now it's really easy to add an offset to the orb to make space for another.

End result

Technical Dive

Achieving this was quite easy once I figured out the setup of the VFX prefab. Spawning the VFX is done quite the same as the cannon icon was before (except it's a 3d object instead of a 2d one), and the offset I decided will be different for each player at random. Each player has a slight offset from the center (namely a Vector3) that it uses every time it spawns the orb. So multiple targets are not only feasible but they just work!

There are downsides though. Do we want the target to always be offset? Or should it be centered unless there are more than one orbs on the same object? Keeping track of this would make the targeting system more accurate, but also more difficult, so I decided to stick to the simple approach for now.

Scoring system

Yes, you heard it right, there is a scoring system! Though premature, I set the base for it. For debugging purposes, I display it on a simple canvas in each corner of the screen, with the score color being the same as the penguin's color. 

For now, players can earn score doing the following:

• Saving runners from the cannon's attack -> +15
• Sabotaging runners, reeling them into the radius of an attack -> +20
• Surviving as a runner for as long as you can -> +1 every 5 seconds
• Destroying Pick-Ups -> just the cannon
• Hitting a runner as the cannon -> +20
  • Hitting multiple runners means earning extra points -> +15 per extra player
  • Bonus points are earned if the cannon manages to tag another player within the first 15 seconds of being tagged -> +15
• Sinking a runner as the cannon -> +30

Score points can be lost as well, but for now the only way to lose some for now is being sunk (-30p).

Breaking ice

Arthur

Now when the cannon hits something the ice breaks and will fall down.

This is to make it harder for the players overtime, as the environment will be more limiting.