Welcome back, guys. We appreciate your support! This post will be about the month leading up to the beginning of November. We really hope you enjoy reading it!
We now have the projectile pig launching correctly. But the problem is it only bounces a few times before just rolling to a stop. The point of the game is to have it bounce around like a pinball. So, I played with the physics of the ball, including the mass, bounce physics of the physical material and others. After a while I finally get the pig bouncing like a superball on steroids. The player will now be able to score more Squashes and collect more eggs. This is exactly what we want.
Now its time to build out the prototype level. I already had a 2d level created in Visio, so I recreated that in the editor with 3d cubes Scaled to different proportions to create the border pieces of the level and the other pieces which I plan on replacing with logs. These pieces are the surfaces that the pig is going to bounce off of, so they need to have flat collision once I have logs put in there.
When originally designing the level,
I kept in mind optimal trajectories the player could adhere to with their pig's flight and plan to place eggs and birds in those paths. This will allow skilled Players to plan their pig paths and score more Squashes in a single launch. This includes having the log pieces in the right positions and rotations to allow them to achieve this.
This week has been about fiddling with the collision to enable the pig to trigger events to get the birds and eggs to register when the pig hits them. My partner & artist, Andrew and I set up the Blueprints so that each of the 3 types of birds has a different point value, and the eggs count as one egg when the player collects them. Andrew set up the Widget for the points to display to the screen, then based on that I set up the 3 types of eggs to do the same. On top of that, we set up a minimum points threshold. The player has to score a certain amount of points per level to progress. However, they can still keep replaying any level they have unlocked to try to beat the high score.
Next, we set up the core game loop. The player launches the pig, the pig Bounces around the level squashing birds and collecting eggs, the pig comes to a stop, and then the player is able to launch another pig. When I first tested it out I soon found out that I could spam the launch button and launch as many pigs as I wanted in rapid succession. This was a problem. But no fear, the do once node is here. Once we adjusted the logic with this node and a couple others, the core game loop was complete.
We also put in a cute 2D pig as the launch pig in place of the boring sphere we had. This is just a placeholder pig and will be replaced by a 3D one in the near future.
Thanks for sticking by us! Your support means the world to us as our passion is the community and the fans. We hope you come by for the next post.
Come see us at DangerousMindGames.com Or message us at Contact@DangerousMindGames.com
Discord: https://discord.gg/vdF4ubqV4z
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dangerousmind.games/
Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa6nUYr3FVpUGqOfHDR5y5w