MAY UPDATE 2 - Better water, new models and animation systemA lot has happened in the last week or so, so I thought that we might as well post another update.
We've been selected for
Yonderplay at the
Nordic Game Conference in Sweden next month and have to prepare a playable demo of the game.
Therefore we've been focused on stability and visuals.
Better waterThe water in the beach world was already looking okay, but it was still not what we wanted it to be, so we put in some time, looked at water shader tutorials and ended up with a look that we really like.
We added
vertex animations with
gerstner waves which gave the water some life. If anyone is interested,
Catlike Coding has some really nice tutorials
here.
By sampling the
depth buffer of the scene, we were able to give the water some better
depth coloring and used it to detect where the foam should be.
The foam look is achieved by sampling a
perlin noise texture and offsetting that with some distortion over time.
This is what we ended up with
New end tileIn each puzzle we have a
end/goal-tile that the player has to reach to finish it and until now it has been a flat-looking grey block that didn't really look like much.
We felt like it had to be more noticeable for the player and wanted it to blend in with the game more.
After looking at games like
Archaica and
Lara Croft Go we came up with something completely different:

(The speed of the gif is a little too fast, but you get the idea :-) )
To animate the tile we had to implement our own
animator component and
animation system, since we hadn't had the need for anything like that until now.
This was luckily easy to implement with our scene/entity-systems and we were able to get it working with the features we needed without any issues.