Welcome back, all you porkers out there! It's time for another update on your favorite game-to-be, Piggy Payback! We have a lot of news for you today, covering the dates from Dec. 11-19, and the game is really staring to feel like a joy ride. Strap yourself in and enjoy!
We created a Blueprint with a cannon mesh, which rotates from straight upward to 90° to the right automatically on a 3 second loop. The player will have to tap the cannon to fire the pig out. For this, we created the Cannon fire logic so that (for now) we can click on the Cannon mesh as its rotating to fire it. We used a spawn projectile system and kept the pig as a projectile rather than a physics body. This way we have more control over the events such as activate and bounce, as well as the gravity scale and bouncimess of the pig. So, the player has much more control now, but it's also a challenge to get the trajectory you want. Next we added the launch power function. We have a slider below the Cannon that will allow the player to choose how fast he wants his pig to launch for even more control and the ability to plan.
We did some updates such as adding in the new "Little Boar" and "Cute Birdie" assets we picked up as placeholders. We imported only the meshes we needed as well as the exact textures and materials we needed to keep the project file size light. We keep a specific project called "Piggy Assets", that we keep all the game's assets in, and then only migrate what we know we will use into the actual project file.
We added the feather mesh to the project again. These are a set of 7 stylized feathers we have that we had to decimate to optimize them for mobile. These feathers will be part of the models for the birds as well as the birds' feather explosion particle system that plays when the player Squashes a bird. We will probably use them for other purposes as well, but we don't know what yet.
Right now the pig is a projectile. We're not sure if we're going to go with this or a physics actor for the final game, but we added a 2d sound of a pig oink sound cue when the pig Bounces. It's a set of 3 different oinks that play at random.
We updated the widgets and added a win screen and updated the game over screen. We hope to create more screens soon. And we also updated the egg collisions to compensate for the projectile. Otherwise nothing would happen when the pig overlapped the eggs.
We then updated the pigs with the new Piggy mesh as well as the birds with the birdie meshes and gave them the three colors to differentiate between them since they're worth different point values and will have different sizes.
As a general thing, we removed a bunch of assets and blueprint code we weren't using. This problem with the projectile and the paddle clipping through is tough. Paddles are working but the collision is not working with a projectile right now - I think we need to create logic to apply force or impulse to the projectile.
I decided to simulate physics on the projectile to see if we can get it bouncing more, and this move proved successful. In addition, we increased the restitution, raise mass to power and some other parameters on the physical material of the logs that make up the level. The pig now bounces around like crazy and Spins a lot more. Before we did this the paddles weren't connecting with the projectile pig properly, but this seems to have solved that problem as well.
We Made projectile pig destroy and enabled new pig to be launched when projectile pig slows down to 50 units/second. Changed the HUD - Egg counts from the actual words ("Golden Eggs", for example) to just a model of the egg. Then, we finally wrote the logic to allow the swinging pig to collect eggs when it comes in contact with them. We've been meaning to get around to this. Next I needed to fix set the cable so it's more bouncy, then make that pig smaller
To make the level look a little better, we added a small landscape for the background of the level. Then, Added some stylized grass and plants to the level as well, and added some new assets such as a windmill, barn, silo, and fence with pigs in it. Next I need to create a Blueprint for the windmill and add a timeline to make it rotate.
This was a big week for updates, and we appreciate that you made it this far. As always, we truly hope that you continue following the progress of Piggy Payback! because your support is everything to us. See you next time!
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