Hi Dear Reader,

This post is about some of the recent updates and changes in the game. 

The good news is that since the basic functionality and gameplay are ready - of course enhancing and adding on is always an option - this enables for more art and game experience enhancements. I am looking forward to seeing the final game, and at the same time I feel the pressure of the semester coming close to the end where I need to stop adding and focus on the quality only.  It seems the time has just passed too quickly and we are reaching into week 9, which means only less than 4 weeks left of the whole development. Exciting!

In the past two weeks, I have started working on the animations in the scene. These are all big tasks and they add a lot to the game experience. This is still a work in progress at this stage, however there are some great updates that I am sharing here.

The fungus bumpers’ bounce animation has been improved. The biggest problem was that the stem was also animating with the bounce and therefore, it was not realistic. I applied scale to the DOTween Engine’s punch animation. This way, it only applies to the head of the fungus, leaving the stem stabile.

Short video showing the bumper animation:

Mushin (the character) also got a new animation once a level is won – his wings flutter quicker for three times. This animation is not yet complete – his face and body will move too.

One of the biggest jobs was to start working on the scene transition animations – after a level is won and before the next level is loaded. The main reason of its importance is that I would like to explain and make the whole story / gameplay sense. What happens when the character collects / absorbs the life ball? Why is he needing it? Why do we have to get the ball to him?

The life ball re-energises both Mushin, the tree spirit and the tree. An animation will glow the tree up after Mushin absorbes the life ball. This way, the story will make more sense and players will understand the reasons behind the gameplay. Not to mention, it will be visually pleasing.

Currently, the whole post-win animation sequence is printed out to the Console, so that I will be able to keep working on it step by step. In Unity, Coroutine was used for the whole win sequence. This enables for the events to play in succession including waiting times.

I got some good advice about the glowing animation – bringing the tree art into Substance Painter and create an emissive channel. I love Substance Painter, so I am looking forward to testing this.

The player’s score is also printed out after the animation will play – currently with placeholder text.

Gameplay video of the current state of the game:

Some design problem solving:

Bumpers are placed all over the screen which means that certain bumpers don’t get attached to the big tree. This was a problem, since fungus floating in the air versus fungus attached to a tree trunk is confusing and not believable. To problem solve this, I painted some extra branches that could be placed under those floating bumpers.

However, this has caused more confusion, because the perspective / position of the main tree trunk on the left didn’t change – however the branches kept changing on the right side of the screen on each level.

To further solve this, I ended up re-painting the big tree trunk without branches attached; and painted some separate branches as well in different shapes. Now, we have a longer tree trunk that is placed gradually higher on the screen on each level – meaning players are working their way up the tree, while the environment – the other branches on the right are changing. This makes more sense, even though re-painting required some extra work, but painting is something I love very much, it helps release stress and to re-connect a bit away from the PC.

This is the new tree art:

I feel more comfortable now using Post Processing tool as I think it is quite important to be able to set certain effects, like blur dinamically in Unity. It definitely saves development type as there is no need to always export - import from Photoshop to Unity to keep testing the blur levels. A new camera has been set up for the tree and branches mainly for depth of field purposes.

That's it for now. I will keep posting progress in the last big hurray.