After spending most of the week joyfully fixing bugs in the script, suddenly it’s time to present “Presentation and Graphics”!
The focus in developing graphics for Biscuit Run up to this point has been simplicity: A two-colour-scheme on a black background, and plain geometric shapes - such as the ubiquitous square-sprite, which was originally used to build the graphics of the platforms, the jump-block obstacles, and even the players. I have really enjoyed how this has worked so far from a game development point-of-view, but also in terms of graphics and presentation. It has allowed the colour and level-layout to be at the forefront of my attention - which has been beneficial in keeping me focussed on what needs to happen to build the game, and also, set the tone for the simple visual style direction that has developed naturally out of what was basically just a pragmatic approach to game design.
While recently I have been toying with some hand-drawn* player-sprites in a new level for testing graphics (level 9), I am still pondering whether these are even needed. The new sprites, which I drew on my phone with a Samsung galaxy pen using Samsung Notes, and later edited in Apple’s Preview, are likeable enough, and I had always been considering using them (in fact they partly inspired the colour theme), but with crunch-time approaching and decisions needing to be made, I am not 100% sure that the plain rectangular player-sprite, that is still used through most of the level scenes, isn’t better suited to Biscuit Run. The jury is out on that still.
Another graphics element that I have recently introduced (again in level 9) is Unity’s Shadow Caster 2D. A tutorial for shadow creation has been open in my browser for a few weeks, and after the idea popped up again in a consultation, I decided I should at least test it out on players (fellow students), before I commit to the barebones design that has dominated so far. The process of this was pretty simple, despite the tutorial actually focussing on applying this effect to a tilemap scene. I created a global light using by clicking in the Unity editor’s hierarchy and selecting from the light menu. It was very simple to adjust the intensity of the global light, which seems to affect everything in the scene if the default (‘everything’) is selected in the Target Sorting Layers settings. The next move was to add a spotlight from the same light menu by clicking in the hierarchy window. This has the same default setting, a shadow strength setting which cam in handy later. Obviously there was something missing at this point because there were no shadows, and this is where I had to split from the tutorial and do my own thing. Because I didn’t have a composite collider set up in my scene, I couldn’t take a short cut and ended up applying the ShadowCaster2D component to pretty much every single object in the scene to get shadows. But the result was worth it. Especially after I made the spotlight a child of the Enemy Triangle gameObject and unleashed it in the scene. Spooky! (example below:)
One more new addition to the game was the StartGame and EndGame scenes. And my enemy prefabs worked a treat in these simple scenes. Dragging and dropping them in after placing a few visible and invisible platforms with colliders was about as simple as it can get. Gotta love prefabs! Ui elements were added in providing a Canvas and Event System, empty objects to hold the Title text using Text (Legacy) components and a different incarnation of the shadow using plain old ‘Shadow’ component to the text’s no-longer-empty-object
Circular biscuits with rigidBody2d components attached. Canvas renderers there too of course and into existence came the (at first very glary) title title scene. Oh, and buttons. Lots and lots of buttons. It did take a little while to recall how to script and set-up all those buttons but it is not too complicated. The trickiest thing was realising that I had to drag the StartButton (which is where I attached the StartGame script) into the OnClick() field for each and every other button I created. I just love that repetition soooo much ;-/ Unity’s buttons are actually really awesome to set up in the editor though fortunately. The last thing was to celebrate in the EndGame scene and fireworks came to mind, but biscuit style. So dropping a bunch of circular ‘biscuits’ and really milking Unity’s physics engine for simple fun, and instead of exploding lights in the sky, why not a particle system of biscuit crumbs!
In what was actually a sheer fluke of happenstance, the Enemy Triangle I had placed in the scene earlier tied in with the biscuits’ physics in runtime in a hilarious way I don’t think I would have consciously designed in so well. I tweaked the timing of the partial explosion to suit the happenings. Yum yum, Enemy Triangle. Don’t those biscuits taste good?!
I should note here, at least as a reminder to myself if no-one else is reading, that I wish that I had originally set up every platform from a single prefab - and then made variants as required. That would make the shadowCaster2d so much quicker to implement. But lesson learned for next time.
Time was up and I had to get feedback on just what I had created so far. It was in my mind that the shadows could go if they cluttered up the scenes, or stay if everyone loved them. The curiosity there was how to apply them quickly without having to adjust every single game object in every scene… and of course the answer there will lie in prefabs - but that is for another day…
This week feedback was sparse. Hmm. Not sure what’s going on there, but I guess it’s a busy time for students. Fortunately, Oliver and Fin were active in the feedback session. (Thanks, guys!).
I think the sprites are interesting and I like the new death animations
Did I mention that I added a pause when the players hit an obstacle - and change their colour? Well it was implemented using the movement script and a few colour settings in the Unity editor. This feedback was referring in part to that ‘animation’, and in part to my hand-drawn* player sprites. (I can call them hand-drawn because I used a galaxy pen right?! ...Insert thoughtful moment here ;-)
i think it might be good if the players gave off light
the sprites are nice for more distinguished characters
Another positive light shone on the new player sprites. (I am still not convinced that I will keep them though). I was already thinking about adding spotlights as children of the players.
On the topic of the new player sprites, after mentioning my thoughts on whether to keep the players as rectangles or not, the following feedback matched my concern:
I think it could go either way. I'd say the only problem is that the new sprites don't match the other simplistic objects as much as the rectangles, but that's just my opinion.
I am really enjoying the 'blockiness' of everything in the scene.
…And that concludes the feedback on this weeks topic. The rest was about game play. It will likely all ‘feed the thoughts’ as I add polish to the game in the coming weeks.
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