We are back with another exciting dev blog for Piggy Payback! Everyday we get closer and closer to the upcoming alpha demo. We are so thankful to those of you who are sticking with us on this. We promise we won't disappoint. We hope you enjoy the read!
For some reason, in the Android build, the pig goes in front of some of the BP_Boards, but hits others. They’re all on the same 0 y axis plane and it doesn’t happen in the editor, so we’re really unsure of what’s happening. We’re currently trying making the boards deeper on the Y axis. We hope this will prevent the pig from going in front of them and not hitting them. But we won’t know until we do another Android build.
Another strange thing that happened is on the rotating pinwheel mesh, the collision suddenly was way less accurate. It was basically a square/diamond shaped collision box. This clearly isn’t good. So we went into the mesh editor and increased the hull count. This made the collision much tighter and solved the problem. We also did this with the round Pig snout bumpers.
We created another Android build so we could see how centered the frames are from the cameras’ view. We were able to adjust the cameras so that all levels have their frames seemingly dead center.
We just added the new and beautiful logo to the main menu of the game. We’ve also been fixing little problems here and there in preparation for the alpha demo. One of the triangle meshes in the project is bugged. Whenever we click it the entire engine freezes so we have to reload it. We had to re-import the mesh as a different triangle to fix it. We also wired up the new levels for music.
We also updated the Pinko level/board. Now when the pig hits a peg, in addition to the sound the peg makes, the pig also makes an “oink” sound. We also replaced the white sphere with the actual piggy mesh we’re currently using. The pig won’t fall now, however, so we have to figure out what the issue is.
We went back to the Pinko Board and added a Pig Squeal SFX when the Pig hits the sides of the board. The triangle pieces that go down the edges of it. We also put a Do Once node before the SFX for both the board and the pegs, with a delay node afterward connected back to the reset pin of the Do Once node. Now the oink and squeal sounds can’t happen too fast, so it doesn’t sound bugged out. We also fixed the pig not falling problem we had.
We decided to start adding the speed bonus multiplier for the pigs before we release the demo. With this, the faster the pig is going when it collects a bird or egg, the higher the point multiplier. We starter out by connecting a 0.3 second timer by event to Beginplay. We got the length of the velocity vector, then divided it by 2000 to get a small number. We then rounded it to the nearest whole number, then clamped it between 1 and 4. So the result is an output of a number between 1 and 4 any time a collectible is hit. Next we have to take that number and multiply it by the point values of each bird and egg. Then we will have a working point multiplier. After that we have to connect it to a widget that displays the point multiplier next to the point pop-ups.
We had to do some work to all the maps/levels in the game. First we had to fix some null objects. We’re unsure of how these objects got this way, but they’re working now. We then added Lightmass importance volumes. We should have done this before, because now the engine knows where to place the “good” lighting and nowhere else, since it’s only going to be seen inside of the frames. Then we built the lighting for all levels.
We also updated the HUD because it wasn’t the right rotation for the second vertical map. Same thing with the pre-play screen that welcomes you to the level and tells you the required score to beat it. But the HUD is all updated now, so onto the next issue.
We realized that the level select screen’s scroll bar was too thin for the player’s thumb to scroll up and down. So we made it thicker. We tried it again and now you can easily scroll up and down to select the level you want to play.
That's all for this week, players. We sincerely hope you enjoyed this weeks post, and we thank you from the bottom of our heart for your support. Catch us next time with all new updates!
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