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[Nordanvinden]

#Update 134 - Magnets and ice orb explosions

Magnets

So I decided to fix the graphics for the magnets that so far has just been transparent boxes in red (positive) and blue(negative). I really wanted the player to know that you would get sucked into the magnet before trying it out. Then the visual design is good enough.

I had some trouble figuring out how to create the magnetic effect. A key thing was that I wanted it to affect the visual look of whats behind it. Because of this, I started looking into panning the UVs used by the refraction normal map into the center of a quad. This turned out to be harder than I though to get right. The first attempt:



This created some unwanted distortions between certain polygons though, so I started looking into making it more like a "flat sphere". This is the result from using an actual sphere:



This looks good but creates another problem; that I would have to change the bounding box that decides when to start applying the magnetic force to a circular shape. That would potentially have a huge affect on the already created levels, so it was a no go.

I went through some different iterations of trying to create this squared out "flar sphere" and ended up with this:





Exploding ice orbs

It was also time to do something about the ice orbs that just disappeared when they were supposed to break. I created a particle effect that gets triggered after the orb disappeares. The "going from red to white color" visualization of the degradation of the orb prior to triggering the particles is still not great though. Im not sure how to visualize it without changing scale or transparency. Maybe scale it right before it explodes..



Final - Bloopers  

[JobLeonard]

By the way, I just noticed that you reside in Stockholm. Same here; if there is ever an indy dev meetup or something that you're joining let me know!

[Nordanvinden]

By the way, I just noticed that you reside in Stockholm. Same here; if there is ever an indy dev meetup or something that you're joining let me know!

Ah, cool! I usually go to the Unity and Indie Game Dungeon meetups

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 135 - Crater boss concept update

So the biggest graphical thing left is the final boss. I have kind of struggled to try to figure out how to make it hard enough but still fun. The ascending orbs were kind of hard to control the difficulty level of. So I started thinking about how I could make it less random and more controllable. This is the idea that I liked the most; letting the boss have octopus like arms that try to grab the player when jumping over gaps. They would have different behaviours just like the orbs.



I also raised the lava-level to create a mysterious look and only show the siluette of the lurking boss beneath you. So you wont see the bosses face until the final battle where you need to get the pillars to fall on its head like before. This concept makes more sense and I like it way more. The ascending orbs might be utilized in the final battle by having the boss spit them out or something.

This is a very early prototype of an "arm" coming up, trying to block the player.

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 136 - Crater boss concept update

I have kept on looking into the crater boss and how it should work and behave. Here is a new gif of how it looks right now:



Here are some prototypes that were more physics driven, but I decided that its behavior became too unpredictable:





I have made a bit more progress but unfortunately I dont have access to my computer since im away over christmas. I hope to show you more progress soon. Until then, Merry Christmas!   

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 137 - Crater boss arm update

Here is the newest version of how the arms work. They shoot up right before the character jumps. And then when the character touches them, they pull down into the lava, hoping to catch the player by surprise.


Getting pulled down by an arm when touching it.


Arm pulls down when player touches it.


If jumping at the right moment, the arm can shoot the player into the air.

Console development

I have also started porting the game to a not yet mentioned console which I think the game will be perfect for. EXCITING but also scary and a lot to learn

[JobLeonard]

Ah, cool! I usually go to the Unity and Indie Game Dungeon meetups [/quote]Nice, will try to make it to the IGD on th 17th

Would that mean I get to playtest this game IRL if I show up?

[Nordanvinden]

Ah, cool! I usually go to the Unity and Indie Game Dungeon meetups Nice, will try to make it to the IGD on th 17th

Would that mean I get to playtest this game IRL if I show up?

Ah, nice!

I'm not sure if I will be able to go yet either but will try as well

And thanks for the reminder, I actually cant remember getting a notification from meetup.. 

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 138 - Crater boss arm update

I have added the next version of arms that the crater boss will have. They will have suction cups that inhales and creates a force towards them. The arm also follows the player/aims at the player to make it a bit harder.

Here is a series of gifs that shows the progress:


Only suction.


Colliding particles.


Arm aiming at player.

I will hopefully be able to make the arm a bit more wobbly and less static, but thats a later problem. For now, I will start making the next and final arm

[freank]

Great style!

[Nordanvinden]

Great style!

Thanks!

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 139 - Quick crater boss update

The idea for the third and final arm is done. It will end up behaving something like this:



It gets actiavted based on how close the player is. It can create some fun moments where the player either gets pulled down or tossed around if they are not close enough.

These are some earlier versions where I could control the arm with keyboard input. Looks kind of silly



I can almost see a core game idea being born here  

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 140 - Tentacle visuals

The visual part of the arm is starting to come together. I have had a hard time trying to figure out how this is supposed to work, but I finally feel like these graphics and movements are working.

The arm is moving back and forth trying to convey some sort of tentacle feeling. This makes the arm a little bit more unpredictable when the player jumps into it. Sometimes the character gets stuck in an "inwards curve" (like in the gif below) and gets pulled down into the lava. If they hit a bump, then they'll be fine. To create a more believable arm I have tried some different things like speeding up the animation when the arm is shooting up.



This is a view where you can see how the collision boxes follows the arms movements.



I am hoping that the rest of the final boss will finally be a bit more straight forward to create

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 140 - Tentacle suction cups

I have updated the tentacles with some suction cups and added them to my prototype arms.





Now I need to crate the final fight. It's mostly visuals but also some minor logic.

Floppy arms 2



Kinda looks like those inflatable tube men (but happy)

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 142 - Boss visuals

I started working on how the boss will look and have something like this in mind so far:



I also had some concerning performance issues that arose from the tentacles. Since they have a pretty deep bone hierarchy (see update 140) every  transformation of the root bone affects all of the other bones transformations. This becomes a ripple effect since I rotate every bone individually And what does not make it better is that every bone has a collider that also has to recalculate all of the physics stuff each time it gets rotated or moved. This added up when all of the tentacles were animating all of the time.

My rather simple but effective fix was to check how close the player was (in the horizontal plane only) and decide if the animation should run or not. This helped a lot and I'm happy that I did not have to figure out a different solution now when they are working as I want them to.

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 143 - Boss fight!

I have almost finished the final boss fight which gives me some hope of ever being done

So the idea for the final fight is this:
- The boss pops up from the lava shooting homing orbs at the player.
- The player needs to steer those orbs into the black pillars above the boss so that they fall into its head.
- Every time the boss gets hit, more tentacles gets added and it moves faster.
- When it dies the final crystal energy is ascending from it's mouth.

I am really hopeful that I will finish this part today 


Firing orbs at player.


Hitting boss with pillar which activates new tentacle.


Boss dies and final crystal energy appeares.

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 144

So unfortunately I have not been able to work this week and will not be able to work the next week either.
But in about two weeks I will be back in full force

Here is a gif from some progress I made this last weekend. It shows:
- Particles for the projectiles that the boss spits out.
- New graphics and particles for the falling pillars.
- The tentacles change color when the boss gets hit.

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 145 - Audio and UI focus

So I am back after a few weeks off, and it feels great

Yesterday I started by evaluating what I have left to do before release. I realised that I have actually come quite far which felt good. Its a classic but spending some time away from your project gives you some perspective.

So I started by evaluating the world map view (when you are in space and choose which level you are going to). It was mostly issues with audio, but also some other things.

The two big things were:
1: Audio not fading out when going into and coming back from a level. This was also true when entering and exiting levels.
2: The UI buttons lost focus when the left mouse button was clicked.

Audio
So there seems to be a few nifty things that Unity has implemented into its audio mixer. I have barely worked with it before so I got positively suprised. The one thing that I really liked was snapshots. When you have set up your different snapshots, Unity has build in methods that allow you to just call the snapshot object like this:

Code:

MixerSnapshotOff.TransitionTo ( 1 );

This will animate between the current snapshot into the MixerSnapshotOff snapshot during 1 second.


Initial snapshot.


Snapshot when the master volume is 0.

There are a lot of other nice things you can do, and this tutorial was really good at displaying them:

https://www.raywenderlich.com/159874/audio-tutorial-for-unity-the-audio-mixer

UI Focus

So the issue was that I only want to use keyboard and controller input when the game is played on PC. But if you are in the options menu and click the left mouse button, the UI loosed its focus. Suddenly the player is stuck and cannot return to the game. I solved this by having a simple script keeping track of when the UI was not focusing any UI object.

Code:

public class UIResetFocus : MonoBehaviour
{

    [SerializeField]
    GameObject FocusedObject;

    void Update ()
    {
        if (EventSystem.current.currentSelectedGameObject == null)
        {
            EventSystem.current.SetSelectedGameObject ( FocusedObject );
        }
    }
}

It is not the pretties solution but it does the trick. Also, make sure that it only runs then the UI is active. I was quite supprised that is wasnt possible to turn off mouse input in a simple way though.

[JobLeonard]

That reminds me: did you ever link any tracks here?

[Nordanvinden]

That reminds me: did you ever link any tracks here?

Hey! Sorry for the late answer.

I did post two audio-clips in #Update 39 (page 4) at the bottom of the post.
A lot has changes so Im not sure if I will be using them, but I still like them.

This is what I wrote then:

I was thinking that this one would play as soon as you start the game and when you hang out in the menus.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3JcE3llNr7BTFlOUmJ2NHJ4dVk/view?usp=sharing

And this one would play in levels of world 1. aka forest levels. I like how its very soothing and makes me calm when I play.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3JcE3llNr7BR0gzcWNtY2txbHM/view?usp=sharing