Monday 26 May 2014

Week 2: 2 Steps Forward, 1 Step Back


Week 2 of Red Sun Development has begun, and already I've made a mess of things. All of the notes and information for this week's update got lost when some re-organizing happened. We're working mostly from memory folks so bear with me.

I'm going to start of with the programming side of things this week. The big news here is that we've been trying to decide whether or not to use a regular physics based character controller or build on ourselves that doesn't get caught up with the limitations of Unity's engine. The upside is that Unity has a pretty nice physics engine but forces you into a few things that can give you problems, especially when you tie it into animation. So we're going to stick with the homebrew controller that doesn't stick to Unity's physics engine. It's going to mean a bit more work in some areas but based on what the programmers have told us, a lot less work in others including fewer headaches for the team as a whole.

Additionally in the world of code, our camera has been working wonderfully. We're getting some added features there including camera panning to see more of the level and zooming in/out. Some of the major design considerations here include what we want the player to actually see when moving the camera around. Since we're focusing on the puzzle element of the platformer genre the goal is let people see what they're up against almost as much as possible. This usually means that the restraints we're likely going to put on it include preventing them from zooming too far out and preventing them from seeing the next room or level. That could really pose some problems. Players aren't meant to see the man behind the curtain.

Speaking of cameras and zooming. We've also started work on the parallax backgrounds. Unity has some pretty sweet built in stuff so it makes things incredibly easy for us. There's a little bit of tweaking to do but for the most part we're working actually constructing the backgrounds. This means lots of drawings of scenery and buildings. It also means that it's coming up on time to actually skin the levels. I don't mean taking the skin off of the levels as you might an animal but just the opposite. We have to put all of the tiles and art into the level. As you saw last week it's just a bunch of small boxes with Xs and Os on them to tell us what they mean. In the future you'll see lots of pretty walls, spikes, and various other hazards. We'll just have to deal with the jarring images for now since the tile sets aren't quite ready.

Moving along, just as Bo can now do, we've got Bo running around fully animated now! It's a pretty big step to have the basic animations nearly completed. They don't look quite right just yet but no one really expected them to look perfect from the get-go. We've got a fair bit of tweaking to do and one more large problem that is rearing it's ugly head. Currently we have agreed on a fairly low framerate for the animations. We don't need a 60 fps game. That said the animations are looking a bit staccato with the current setup so we might have to generate some more frames. This isn't necessarily as easy as just pulling the arms in here or there but might require a fair bit more work. Unfortunately we don't have our animator for the entire summer, but we're confident she's up to the challenge.

Lastly we've got a bit more concept art and the tutorial level is starting to take shape. Things are coming along quite nicely even though we're still quite early in the cycle, so lets keep this ball rolling and return to you guys next week.

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