Art Devlog

Oh yeah, it's all coming together.

This week has been about visual fixes, and ensuring that we have a nice and varied scene to play in. Adding plenty of things we thought were missing in the first version of the level, and replacing creative placeholder solutions. Like rocks posing as palm trees with a bush on top.

Everyone loves gifs right?

With a lot more personality in the back of the level we hope that the game will be more eyepleasing and lively to look at as you are playing the game. These are some things that made it into the game this week, though there is a lot more in the works.

We also worked on some more technical aspects of the visuals - we made a shader that makes the sand darker the lower you go, it was a lot of headbanging but after some patience it worked! It creates a nice gradient and communicates to the player about the depth of the sand more. Another shader we made is the vertex animation, it really brings the world to life and makes everything look that much more polished!

Furthermore, we added the vertex deformation within the shader to make the foliage appear to be moved by wind. This was done using noise and position nodes and plugged into the position of the shader.  We created materials for both foliage in the ocean & the foliage on land to separate the wind/ noise strength on the planes of the foliage. 

We created a few more particles like the water splashing that results from the water crashing on the beach. This was done using the particle system in unity while using a few sprites that were then compiled together into one system.  We also created a few variations of how the pearls would look using both particle systems and just a shader & material. However, after a discussion within the team,  we decided to go with a material instead of  a particle system and to make the material within substance itself. 

We also created the poop animation by using Zbrush to sculpt the falling poop using layers and then exporting it to maya to use blend deform animation. By using the in between option of the blend deform we were able to get one slider which will create a smooth animation between the meshes. 

Programming Devlog

This week we focused a bit more on playtesting and bugfixing. Because we saw a lot of things weren't going as expected when playing the game. 

The seagull now interacts with the terrain and deforms it when he dives in for food, there were some moments where the seagull wasn't being found and we found out that if two players use the food pickup at the same time then a single seagull would behave weird, this is something we'll be fixing in the next update!

The animation for the crab is also implemented and we changed the crab movement from facing his direction to sideways walking.

We figured out that there was a weird wobble in the rotation and fixed that as well, right now when you walk around as the crab and ran in small circles the crab would make very weird small rotations because he couldn't correctly figure out how he had to rotate.

When picking up a n object, the object would kind of stick to the crab without a real way for us to control where it would be and where it would be placed, this caused for some weird moments as well that you would place down an item and it would immediately pick it up again, by adding a standard spot that the object will be placed at we got rid of these small bugs.

Another bug with the pickups! This one was while digging and finding an object, you would collide into the pickup and be forced out, this caused you to be launched into the air.

We added buckets! These will allow the player to dig on wet sand or place sand on the wet patches.

We also started programming the main menu and the UI, but these are in very early stages of development so look out for those in the next update!