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[DEVLOG] Between Life and Death

A topic by Aziz created Feb 07, 2020 Views: 237 Replies: 4
Viewing posts 1 to 5

[DAY 1]

Our game is about switching between the realm of the living and the dead to solve puzzles. Each realm looks different from the other which you can use to your advantage to reach places with one form that you can't with the other.

[Story so far]

A young woman has been condemned to the Underworld for her actions. Her goal is climb back to the surface. We are still thinking of the reason she got condemned in the first place. That's all we have for now.

[Progress]

First we started prototyping with getting the mechanic working that allows you swap between the living and the dead:

We split up work between designing mechanics and getting the prototype running. The above took about 2 hours to get right. We also did thing like set up a hacknplan project and version control in GitHub.

We also made a second version of the prototype because we weren't sure if we wanted the spirit form to be able to float around freely. So we decided to just test it:

We think this might be a bit overpowered :D

We also implemented a little timer. It won't save the floating mechanic but we will experiment with it more because it might make for some tense moments:


But we wanted to make sure that there were things that the spirit can do which the body can't. So we started messing with effectors in Unity. For those who are not familiar: an effector allows you to implement effects like strong winds for examples, or surfaces that give you speed boosts when you run over them like in Mario Kart. The idea was that the spirit form would be able to glide among these spiritual gusts of wind to get to places.

For clarification: when the white cube is in between those black/red tiles he is being lifted up by an effector. We weren't moving the character up. You'll have to take our word for it :D. One medium sized problem we ran into is that our character controller doesn't get affected by these effectors. So we had to use a character controller for the spirit form that isn't affected by gravity just for prototyping. Our intent is that the spirit form can run and jump just like the normal form can.

In the meantime our mighty designer drew a prototype level:

The black rectangle allows you to switch the direction of an effector btw.

Next up is fixing the problem with the effector and the character controller and doing some early polishing on mechanics. Art is being worked on too. 

We'll be updating daily! Let us know what you think :)

This is what happens when the player controller and the effecter try to be friendly btw:

(+1)

[DAY 2] 

We have started to use the tiles that are ready and implemented a new mechanic. The mechanic allows you the change a platform to the other type without astral projecting. We thought this might make for more complex puzzles:

We also managed to fix the problem we had with the effectors in Unity. The spirit can now move just like the physical body can and glide the wind. We also updated our character controller with coyote time and collision detection that feels better when jumping. 

All the levels we want to make have been sketched out too. Now that the mechanics are mostly complete we can focus on building these. So far we are a bit behind schedule but I think we can still make it.

There are two bugs that we have now. One is visible in the gif. When you switch to the other realm, the transition is rough sometimes and you can see the player stutter in the air which feels and looks bad. The second bug is on the effectors. When you are transitioning between effectors the character goes nuts and starts bouncing all over the place. I'm thinking of letting this be and making sure there are no overlapping effectors and instead just adjust the levels a tiny bit accordingly. I am not sure if it's worth fixing.

Meanwhile music and art are being crafted vigorously! So yeah a bit behind schedule but like I said I believe we will make it. Tomorrow we will build all the levels with the assets, do a bit of bugfixing and get the music in. I look forward to sharing our progress then.

Good luck everyone!

(+1)

looks great

HostSubmitted

great work !