Posted March 25, 2021 by Regis Goossens
Hello again!
The first production sprint has officially ended. Have a look at what’s been in the making.
We’ve updated and refined the texture and material for the water block so it could be implemented in our project. Previously there was, besides the swimming animation, no real indicator what the position of the rising water was. Adding actual visuals to the water has largely fixed this issue.
The background for the standard/started biome is now finished and added in-game. It took a lot of redraw and overdraw to get the feel right and try to make it as immersive and visually pleasing as possible.
Last but not least we’ve created some extra blocks to be implemented into our game. These are the death block, a block that shoots out spikes and pulls them back in after a while and a climbing block which allows the player to climb up when they bump into the side of the block that has the ladder.
Aside from this we also have some particles in the making: blood, a water splash for the character and wind falling down with the metal block.
For the biomes, we first focused on the standard spring biome. Goal was to create at least 3 different islands that we can scatter around in the near background to add visual appealing assets to the game while maintaining the low poly style. Therefore we had to come up with some new ideas, because it is not that easy to create something readable with just blocks. The main goal was readability. Adding a little cabin, a well and a garden makes an island unique. It is clearly readable as a wooden cabin which is important because the player will move fast and will focus on the game and the movement. It is important to have a clean silhouette that you can read in a millisecond.
For the texture for the islands, we decided for a texture sheet by unwrapping all the blocks to the correcponding part on the texture.
Finally, we can also put a first picture of our hero character, standing on a block in the world, on our cover page!
New mechanic, swimming! The player slowly starts sinking upon falling into the water, quickly press the jump key to stay afloat and jump out of the water!
You can now climb higher and test your skills, the blocks have a dynamic spawning position and the game will always try to keep it interesting.
The challenge here was to move the block spawner together with the player as he is climbing, but to also move it down in case the player falls down. This makes sure that any biome transitions will still quickly reach the player so that he/she experiences the world in an up-to-date state.
The block spawner will destroy any blocks it comes across when descending with the player and eventually spawn new blocks as if nothing ever happened.
Blocks will now start falling slightly faster as the player moves up in his journey. This makes sure that the player can never truly escape the grasp of the water. The water starts catching up fast enough so that you can slightly get it out of your viewport, but will soon enough encounter it again when you fall down. No matter how skilled you are.
Next sprint will include more difficulty scaling together with the happiness mechanic. This mechanic will force the player to try and climb to escape from the water. If the player is able to climb too high, that means the game is too easy and there is no room for punishment. Hence the dynamic water speeds.