Welcome back, Piglets! 🐷 We're excited to tell you about some of the improvements in this update. So load your pig, and let's squash some moody birds!
This update we set up enumerations for various sizes of birds and eggs, for any and all characters we introduce into the game, for future hazards and power-ups, and many other things. The game is going to get very interesting, so stay tuned!
We've decided to use nice 2D backgrounds for the levels instead of 3D ones. We've also decided those backgrounds will look like paintings, and the border of the level will he a picture frame instead of those out of place logs. Since we've fully committed to using 2d backgrounds, we added a png file of a cartoon/stylized forest into the project, created a Material out of it and put it on a cube Scaled up to the size of the picture frame. Now that image is the background. This style is much nicer than the 3D levels we were using before. We plan to have a cartoon 2D artist make the final backgrounds we will use in the game.
We did a bunch of improvements to the game this week, including a new "boom" SFX when the pig is launched, and 3 different "poof" SFX for when the pig overlaps and Destroys the 3 different types of birds we currently have.
Another thing we did was for performance reasons. Instead of using complex collision on the '+' bumpers, I'm going to use the KDOP collision, so it costs less performance wise, yet still hugs the bumper pieces (is the same size and shape)
We also made some updates to the main menu and HUD elements. We added a retry Button to the pause, win and lose screens so that the player can quickly try again when things go awry.
We created a master material for the project. This material will be applied to everything in the game. This saves on performance and solves several other issues, such as the cel shading with outlines look we're going for. We were having an issue getting the outlines right on the assets other than the eggs and birds. This should solve it.
We fixed some incorrect things like the egg counts on the HUD vs how many there are in the levels. We added a sky sphere to the main menu to give it a nice atmosphere with clouds for the Piggies to admire. [Image of sky sphere in main menu]
Some other optimization things we did: Combined all the widget blueprints into one. We had about 6 different widgets for the HUD, the DMG splash screen, a blur effect, etc. Now its all neatly in one widget. We just choose when to show what we screen we want you to see based on what you're doing. And also started a single blueprint for all audio.
We also did some updates to the HUD such as a change to the power bar and fire button, as well as making them more transparent by lowering the opacity.
Plus we made all HUD elements smaller to fit nicely on a mobile phone screen. They were too big and took up a lot of the screen, and the buttons were bigger than they needed to be.
Oh, and we also added a level select screen for the demo. This Is going to be updated further as time goes on.
And we also added a piggy wallpaper for the parts of the screen that the level doesn't fill.
We set the aspect ratio of the level frames right at the average of the most popular phones so there will be as little gaps as possible, but in order to not see black where those gaps are, we have the background wallpaper.
Lastly, we made it so the power bar and fire button disappear after the Piggy is launched so as little of the play area as possible is being covered. This opens up the level visually and definitely feels like the right move.
That wraps up this edition of the Piggy Payback! devblog. We hope you enjoyed reading it as much as we did creating it! As always, there's much more to come, so stick around! You'll be glad you did.🐷
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