Game 1 design process (catch up post - Part 3)

Discussing the map issue with Mark and Paul we figured we could compromise a bit by sliding the terrain under the bubble when it reached certain points, leaving the camera fixed. It would be tricky though. Not sure that's how I want to go, let alone what I'm capable of doing...

Leaving the map stuff aside for a bit I started working on movement scripting for my bubble.

The bubble as a character is simplicity itself, being essentially just a sphere. Being a bubble it needs to pop around fairly easily. Most of that can be achieved using gravity, mass, drag, etc.

The actual movement originally planned for the bubble, being just explosive force, wasn't that difficult. The difficulty happened when the bubble was moved off a plane and onto a terrain and the camera angles were changed. The bubble plopped around just fine on a plane using point and click left mouse button triggers, with a simple perspective view from a natural angle on it. Change the camera angle, and all of a sudden the bubble wouldn't move. I'm presuming from the fact that raycasting was working from the camera's perspective and that got all messed up when the camera angle changed. Whack the bubble on a terrain and the same thing happened, I have no idea why. So I left the bubble on a plane.

My original movement script for the bubble was pretty much how the tutorial made it. When Mark had a look at it, it varied somewhat so that now the bubble could turn on its axis to change its forward direction and angle of bounce, and also added a bounce using the space bar. I kept in the mouse click bounce as well. That seemed to work fairly well on a test plane.

After that I added in some obstacles for my bubble to bounce into. From my map I knew I wanted thorn bushes for the bubble to bounce off, and logs for the bubble to jump over, as well as the bounding bushes which would keep him on his path.

A physic material was added to the thorn bushes to make them bouncy, and that worked quite well. I had to fiddle with the settings a fair bit to make the bubble have an appropriate amount of reactive force from running into the thorn bush, but it ended up looking quite nice. The logs are basically just static, immovable objects; so they were easy.

So far so good.

With that sorted I started working on the design of the game. I wanted to keep things simple and clean, not quite cartoony, but definitely stylised. Using the reference images I found a colour palette that I liked and put together a default background image. Oh I also at this point thought of my game's name: "prehisTARic". Get it? Get it???

Sigh. As Death said in The Hogfather, "I don't know if you noticed, Albert, but that was a pune, or play on words."

Anyway. I had fun finding some suitably tarry looking fonts, played with some photoshop tutorials to make an iridescent effect for my bubbles, and put some shapes and gradients together.

Here's what my title page started looking like:

The idea is to give the bubbles some animation so they bounce around. Although I'm not really a fan of how the bubbles are looking - not really fitting the theme. I'll work on that later. Everything else I'm liking though.