Hello, everyone. Thank you for tuning in to our latest devblog installment. It’s our unfortunate duty to inform you that our Kickstarter dreams have come to an end. Our project was banned from Kickstarter because we made the mistake of putting the bio of our artist from Syria in our story page. Even though he never officially joined the team, and we hadn’t launched our campaign, Kickstarter still felt it necessary to perma-ban us and refused to discuss it beyond the point where they acknowledged that we didn’t actually do anything wrong. They refused to tell me what exactly the problem was with having somebody from Syria in our bio section, even though he wasn’t actually on the team, beyond telling us about an obscure law called “OFAC sanction”.
So our funding hopes have been put on hold, but we will never give up. We promise that we will bring you this game that you’ve spent your precious time following for so long. It may not be the same exact game, but all of the love and passion we had will still go into it. And all or most of our cool ideas will still be included. "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." - Winston Churchill
We have, however, started a Patreon account for any of our followers to support us if they want to. We hope you guys will support us here, as we have so many ideas and we’re working so hard that we have a long list of games just ready to be pumped out for you guys to play. All we need is one shot, and we will show you exactly what we’re all about.
If you would like to support us, please visit this link. It would mean everything to us:
https://patreon.com/DangerousMindGames?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=join_link
Now, with that out of the way, on to what we’ve been working on for you!
We are so excited to tell you that the original theme song for Piggy Payback! Is complete! We brought Karpo of KarpoSoundtracks onto the team and he knocked this first track out of the park. At our direction, and with some of our ideas, he expertly crafted what we feel to be the perfect Piggy Payback! song. We can't wait for you guys to open up the game for the first time, see that stunning menu and hear the glory of the games theme song! Something that's not new to you, but is a much needed peace of mind thing for us is that we setup the finalized logic for such things as the base SFX & music system, the base win/lose screen system, the base power-ups system and more. This code will allow us to quickly create more versions of it based on the base code. So, we can now easily add a new power-up to the game without having to go through most of what we had to do to set it up. Stuff like this is really making the game's development begin to go smoothly.
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We also finally solidified the code for the Piggy Points collection system. You will be able to score Piggy Points by playing the game. Each time you squash a bird, steal an egg, hit a bumper, etc. you will collect Piggy Points to spend on things like Piggy lives, power-ups, Piggy level upgrades
and more! Piggy Points are the in-game currency. The premium currency will be Boar Bucks. This Is the money you use to buy cosmetic items for your pigs. Hats, shades/glasses, jewelry, shoes, etc. can all be purchased with Piggy Points.
*There will be NO PAY-TO-WIN in Piggy Payback!
One of the new consolidated blueprints we created is called BP_World: It contains the background, the level frame and the camera for the level. This is a much more neat and organized way of doing it. We can switch out the frame for each level individually, move it easily, swap out the background for a new one in each episode (20 levels) and we have access to all the camera options we need, right in the level editor. This makes for a very smooth and easy development process.
We’re working hard on bringing new levels to you. We had to start over a few times because some things needed to be adjusted, and we had to keep sending the project back and forth between me (Bo) and Andrew (our technical artist), since our source control is giving us issues. We’re working on getting it back online to continue with the levels. This level has a TNT ladder - A spot where the goal is to get your pig to bounce back and forth up the TNT boxes to get big points. We also plan on putting a spinning physics gate in it to unlock a cage with a golden egg in it in the top right corner. Once you spin the physics gate for 5 full rotations, the cage’s floor drops out and the golden egg drops to the floor. Now, you just have to collect it!
Want to see something funny? This is what the cannon will look like before you launch your pig. The pig will be half sticking out of it, due to its eagerness to squash birds, and the fact that it needs to see where it’s going to fly!
Another thing we did is we added the outlines to the main menu level with the 3D forest and waterfall/river. The problem we’re having is that with the settings the way we have them, the outlines on everything look great, except for the pig. The pig doesn’t have enough details in his outlines. So we’re going to have to use a different tool for the pig’s outlines. We are going to look into the master material we got from the Epic Marketplace, as it’s supposed to have an outline feature. We can add separate outlines to just the pig. We feel it’s going to all look very good pretty soon. The reason the UI elements don't match in this image is because we're in the process of changing them all to the same style as the buttons on the bottom left.
Speaking of the main menu, we have the Piggy Payback! Theme track playing on a loop in this menu, and all others. It really brings the menu system to life and we think it’s looking and sounding great.
The WIP beta menu buttons are also in the main menu. We still have to add the explore button, which itself has a bunch of buttons that open different pages. The button appearance will change and improve, but the layout will likely stay the same. We hope to have most of the menu system working for the beta demo.
We were having this problem with the triangle blocks, specifically their collision. The default collision was a different shape than the triangle, so the pig would bounce off of the block without actually visually hitting it. We can’t use complex collision on every triangle, as that would be far to costly on performance. So we decided to just remove the collision, and add three box collisions, flatten them very thin, and place them along each side of the triangle. This seems to completely fix the issue. Now we can move onto more pressing issues.
Another issue we’re having is the pig is once again clipping (going) through the paddles. We solved this once already, but since we redid a lot of the project, the problem is back. We’re going to try solving it by doing what we did before. If this doesn’t work, it’s time to put on our problem solving hats again. Welp, this wraps up this edition of the Piggy Payback! devblog. We've hit some tough times, but there is nothing that's going to stop us from finishing and releasing this game. We're so excited for you to play the upcoming beta demo. The alpha demo was met with overwhelmingly positive feedback, and this upcoming demo is even better!
We want to thank you for continuing to follow along with us and stay updated on the progress of Piggy. You guys are the thing that motivates us the most! We'll see you soon!
DangerousMindGames.com/Piggy-Payback-1
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