And boom goes the dynamite! What's up Piggy Paybackers?! We're very excited about this weeks devblog. We made some really cool updates and were getting closer and closer to the open alpha demo! We sincerely hope you enjoy the read and are so thankful for your support!
We have an announcement to make. The game will now look 2D, even with 3D assets. We set the cameras of each of the levels we currently have to a field of view of 5, and then moved them way back. This is because when you lower the FOV the camera zooms in. Now we have that orthographic 2D look we wanted. This prevents the birds and eggs on the edges of the levels from being seen at a side-angle. Now, every asset in the level is seen directly head on. It looks much more eye-pleasing and professional. This is a big change to how he player sees the level, and we believe it’s going to improve the gestalt greatly.
We've been working on a few new mechanics lately. The Crow Bomb, which is a Crow that floats in the air (will have a wing flapping animation eventually), and when you hit it with your pig, it Bounces around the level for 5 seconds with zero gravity, and then after 5 seconds it blows up and takes out any collectible within its explosion radius. We're going to set up some levels so that there are collectibles (birds, eggs, feathers, etc) behind walls or other objects so that only the crow bomb can take them out.
Right now we have the base mechanic working. The crow bounces around and the explosion sphere quickly grows out of it and destroys anything within it. We also just now got the explosion particle and pop-up points working, so your timing is perfect! So when the crow-bomb explodes, you see a stylized explosion. This is actually two different single-emitter particle systems. We will probably add a third system for the smoke that lingers when it explodes. The two particles are a simple round explosion, and a circle of fire that expands outward as the collision sphere grows and destroys birds and eggs. It ooks really cool. In addition, the points you score from these collectibles pop up on screen and fade out just like when your pig squashes them himself!
We’re not done yet, though. The particles now show up after the collision sphere. So, by the time the explosion hits the collectibles, they’re already gone. We ended up fixing this by putting the timeline and set sphere radius nodes before the timelines, and putting the destroy actor node after the finished pin of the timeline. Now the crow bomb is complete, all except for its final mesh. It works exactly how we planned from the beginning.
In addition to the Crow-bomb, we also want to have simple grey birds that are like the crow bomb, that we introduce first that just bounce around and take out any collectibles they touch. We may implement a touch-trap which is a cage that drops down when you touch it and can trap the bird, giving the player points. But we haven't decided on that yet.
In order to use these particles, first we had to migrate it into the project, which of course completely breaks it. So we do that, then we have to replace the textures that make up their parent materials, and then replace the parent slot in the material instances that are associated wit the particles. Once all of that was completed, we tested out the crow-bomb. We saw no explosion. We realized this was because the explosion particles were very small. So we went into the emitters inside the particle editor, and found where it says “Sprite size”. After increasing this number several times, we finally got to the same size as the collision sphere that actually destroys the birds and eggs. The one particle was working at this point, but the other was not. It turns out that, since they’re 2D, the particle had to be rotated 90 degrees on the X. Now they’re both visible and working perfectly.
We were having trouble with the button deck because for some reason only one button lights up. It turns out the buttons would set themselves in the same position when hit so they were actually lighting up but they moved to the same spot so it looked like only one button lit up.
And that wraps up this week's post. We really hope you enjoyed reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it. Piggy Payback! has come so far and without you this would be much less enjoyable for us. We hope you have a great day and stay safe out there!
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