Final BlogPost!

Our game is almost complete.

I feel this game has both been a challenge but also a great experience for all of our team. 

Georgia, as our main 2D lead has continually improved the game's textures and level designs. 

Zoe, as our all-rounder, has continued to help with the animations, textures, and models. The Pig animations are also Zoe's work while myself (Tom) worked on the walk cycle and idle animations for the other characters as well as the props. 

Alex has been working very hard with Brad as our sole programmer, uploading all our assets as well as the coding and in charge of the debugging and testing. 

As of today all of our character and props are fully modelled, animated, unwrapped, textured and uploaded to unity from scratch. This would not have been possible without teamwork and working together to help each other as our group had a range of inexperienced members and final-year year members, and team members with more specialised skills rather then diverse. 

Our Main Development pipeline was:

Tom: Modelling > Unwrapping > Animations

Zoe: 2D Level Design > Additional Models and Textures > Improving Models > Unwrapping > Improving Animations. 

Georgia: 2D Art Lead > Textures (A ton of textures)

Alex: Coding > Testing Lead > Unity Assets 

Bellow are some examples: Our current game layout by Alex, Textures by Georgia (Left), Startled Pig animation by Zoe and Yeti walk animation by Tom. (Right)

That's it from us, thank you everyone!

I've been texturing

So some more examples of how we're using textures to make object/enemy interaction/type clear to the player.

Attached are different textures for different levers (all the same model). One lever (red/purple) requires the head to push it once to activate, another (yellow/red) requires the butt to push it once to activate it. The last (blue/green) can be activated by either head or body, but only activates doors/bridges while being held.

Playtests

We've had 3 play tests done at a very buggy stage and then another 3 at a much less broken stage.
One bug involved enemy collisions with pig to launch poor pig high into the air. Pig also had a slow fall speed resulting in this floating bounce effect.
At this early buggy stage, the enemy hurt boxes were also too small, so pig would hit a cat, get launched, and face no damage.
Some players, I noticed, had the most fun playing with this bug and experimenting with the physics than they did playing the game as intended.
The launch bug/feature was being used to speed run the game (float over obstacles) and to get into unlikely places (see the attached image, which took 10 minutes of attempting to achieve).



Also, the pig aint stretching. Which is a pain, since this was the core mechanic we built around. But it's a nightmare to code. The game is playable with the butt and head separated still, and the controls are the same. It's still an interesting mechanic to control two halves of the same entity. And, maybe we slap on some particle effects, it'll look intentional?

One thing we learnt from both sets of play tests was that object interaction was just not clear enough - this in part due to some textures not being attached yet - but we will be needing some in game instructions for the first level at least.

Still, people reported enjoying the game and facing challenges, figuring out how to pass obstacles.

And that launch bug might become a launch feature. Of course, launching would have the drawback of actually dealing damage. Which would balance it, but keep it fun. You could sacrifice a health unit to access secret areas, collect hidden stars. And it's hilarious to watch pig jettisoned into space by cats.