The end of our first production sprint is nearing, and we are thrilled to share our progress of Oh Crab.

Art Devlog

With the essential models mostly done this week has been very focused on making those models extra spiffy with rigs, animations and fx.

The crab walks! Animating with no prior experience has proved to be somewhat of a challenge, and for the polish phase it might be a good idea to seek the aid of an animator to figure out how to best clean it up a bit, and add some micromovements to bring life to the crustacean.

It turns out that during the modeling process the unit setups of one of the artists' 3DS Max's was set up wrong, which has caused some scaling issues rippling out. Production for this artist stopped toward the end of the sprint and was spent troubleshooting and tracking down this issue, and adjusting the affected files.

The Particles for the dust destruction, the bubbles & the dust trail were made using Particle Systems in unity.  The dust destruction will be programmed to appear once a castle has been destroyed or downgraded. while the bubbles will show once there are items in the sea. & finally the dust trail will appear whenever the crab moves  around the beach.

Sprites were used for both the dust destruction and the first initial bubble test however we later decided that using a mesh instead of a sprite for the bubble would look better.

The dust trail was also made using cloud / smoke sprites . Rate by distance was enabled for the dust trail so it would follow around any object that it is parented to. This way the dust trail will follow the crab creating the trail. 

We also made a particle for when the castles level up - Unity particles are certainly quite different from Niagara (the plugin we were used to working with), but it was a nice learning experience and rewarding when everything worked out. 

The castles for our game are also done, combined with the previous week, we have 5 castle variations with their separate levels. Next sprint we will make the destroyed and mold versions of the castles.

We also put together the game level, it is really nice to see everything come together! Lighting and post processing in Unity was a bit of a pain to figure out, but we are happy with the result so far.

It is exciting to see everything come together into a coherent level.

Programming Devlog

This week was focusing on cleaning up some of the gameplay elements we made, making sure that everything currently in the game worked without breaking.

A simple example was the digging and placing of the sand, missing a value could mean getting quite the result.

We cleaned up the interaction of our wave pull and push force so that once items enter the sea they would de-spawn once out of vision.

We cleaned up the seagull  interaction with the food and fixed the bug that a player could push him around and fixed some of the coding errors that came along with it.

we made it possible to set up a losing and winning state, which we will continue working on in the next sprint as that is where we will implement menus and the like.

We also continued working on the interaction of the water, which was quite difficult to get right.