Devlog 8: Making it look good

Hello and welcome back to our weekly devlog! This week was all about making it look and feel good. 

The game feels like a Mario Party type of game right now, which is great, but it lacks purpose. Let's see how we tackled that this week...

Art

Jens

Hello again. Im back at it again with the pickups implementing them in the game and making them SPINNNNN! I made a quick model and put the texture on there, made a RFX out of it and bam here is the final result.

I also made the little crown for on top of the winning penguin. Although it was easy to make im really satisfied with how it turned out.

Then i also finished the cannon off with some simple gradient textures. 

In the mean time i also made some icons for the penguins for the ui when playing. Really like the angle there he just *Stares* at you.

Finally i also made a new arena (it was about time) and my fellow partners in crime helped with filling in the environment already.

Alright thats all from me. On to the next!

Job hopping

Agne

This week I dipped my toes in character animation, and I found out it's actually pretty fun!

Since we made a few changes on the character mesh we unfortunately lost the previous animations made and I decided to take the matter in my own hands. I had to put some time into learning something I had never even slightly looked into, especially in a software i am not comfortable with. Despite everything, I found animating in blender pretty intuitive.

Now our penguin waddles!

And he also idles

Apart from my newly found occupation, i also took care of the set dressing of this godforsaken map.

With the help of Ioana i made a new blockout and some extra props, which i unwrapped and packed into what will be our environment trimsheet.

Here, a quick before and after. Spot the differences!

Finishing up with some extra touches on the game menus, I made a shader for the selection screen that automatically assigns a complementary color to the background of the penguin. 

This way the background will never be the same color as the skin the player chooses.

Lighting

Ioana

Yes, I can do art too.

This week I had to focus a bit on the looks of the game as well. One thing I was able to manage was the scene's lighting. After quite a bit of tweaking, I was able to get the vibe I was aiming for.

Scene layout

With the help of Agne's blockout and Jen's arena, I modeled the screens for the scoring and made sure everything was placed neatly in the scene. 

Coding

Arthur

After some play tests we decided to change the movement again. Now you can aim and move with 2 sticks!!!!
Because of this we also allow moving while walking. This hopefully encourages the player to reel more to the other players.

Because one of our artists dropped I had to take over some art stuff namely the rigging and scaling of the model.
I didn't have a blend file to start from only a fbx which added some fun things to the model

But after clean up and fixing the scaling. The model could get started to add animations.

Another thing which wasn't clear was the switching. We teleported the players in a flash with out giving clear indicator on what was going on.
So now players animate in the correct positions once a penguin was hit. In hindsight this should have been done from the start.

There is also a score system added so now we need to indicate who has the most points. I added a little crown above the players head to make him the leader.
The ui background also got some addictions. Sadly, this happens with some unity bs. As the new ui system doesn't support shaders :(. So, I rendered the background in the word. If you now change the resolution of the game it breaks but who is going to do right?

Reeling

Ioana

You thought I only did some art this week, didn't you

After some playtest we decided that reeling should be even more stupid easy, so one small tweak has been tweaked: If aiming towards a target and your target's preview goes past them, you will still reel them.

Pickups

You heard that right. We have pickups! 

Well... pickup to be more precise. More are coming later.

Speed buff pickup

Not much to say from me this week to be fair. Other than the main things I mentioned, I fixed quite a few things that kept breaking 🫠but that's not fun to mention, is it?

We hope you liked the work we put in this week, and we can't wait for you to

Come back for next week!

Have a blessed day! 🌟