Cutscenes

We're trying to make a somewhat silly game that's a bit unexpected, so throwing the player into a strange, unexplained situation seems completely appropriate, but we're also aiming for a smooth gaming experience. To polish it up we're adding some cutscenes to tell the backstory.

I'm using the Timeline in Unity to layout the cutscene. Like a typical video editor, the timeline lets you take various animations and organize them into a continuous movie experience. Here is the timeline for the introduction cutscene:

It's pretty simple. The rows in the table are separate tracks that roughly correspond to different objects in the world. The top track is the camera, then three tracks for the sloth related items and three more for the chimp (our antagonist). The whole scene takes only 43 seconds, but took a couple of days to plan, build art and choreograph.

Spider Web Trampolines

We had this idea for bouncy spider webs but it seemed too uncontrollable to be of any use as a mechanic. But spider webs are sticky, so we got the idea that you could grab onto them as they are bouncing. But if you let go of a web that's just bouncing up and down, you will only fly up or down. So, we made these webs go around in a circle. Now when you let go, you go flying in the direction you were heading when you released. For added control, the circular motion of the web scales as it makes each circuit. It starts with small circles and gets bigger and bigger, then repeats. If you let go on the biggest circle, you can really propel the sloth across the scene!