Small changes with huge potential
This week was a very productive one. We addressed a lot of our concerns: discussed them, create concluding tasks for them and even completed some of those. As I am still exhausted because of the Global Game Jam, I will provide only a quick overview.
Audio
As we canceled our original idea to create a music system on our own to save up more time for the other parts, it was up to me to implement the dynamic music system. The vision of the original idea was shifted into the new system but as a simpler one: There will be only three different layers of music (background, rapids, pursuing boat). The background track will be hearable all the time. The rapid track will be added when the players are facing the corresponding track section and the pursuing boat track will rise slowly in volume the closer the pursuing boat gets to the players.
The only thing I worried about was to sync all the music layers with their beats. Gladly, Cécile gave me the promising hint to solve this problem by starting each layer right at the beginning of the level and at the same time, but tune them down to zero volume. This way, I only have to unmute the layers if needed.
The prototype proves the concept by now. We can go on with looking for the right track for our game.
I also implemented the impact sounds for the boat, the treasure and the recorded vocals of Gina and Rebecca.
Rapids: Global Changer
As Rebecca balanced our level flow, she had to address the rapids because they are one of the main parts of every level. Each tile contains up to 50 rapids and we have 18 tiles that want to get tested. Each collision sphere in the following picture represents a rapid:
To speed up her process, she asked me to give her a quicker way to alter every rapid in the scene to prototype different settings. I created her a tool, that can differ between six different kinds of rapids:
Character Animation Controller
This week, David was going to begin to animate our first character. We exchanged our requirements for the animations and created a concept for a prototype. The following demonstrates the implementation:
Shootable Treasure Chests
Rebecca and Emanuel came up with the idea to regain some gold by shooting on chests while playing. David provided me with an asset to fulfill this task. Right now, I only implemented a very basic prove-of-concept so that Rebecca can test the idea.
Cannon Aligning
The cannon should align itself with the selected target automatically. By that, the players have an additional feedback on what they are going to shot. I struggled a lot with the Blender export again and I still haven’t any idea how to conclude that. At the end, I deleted the whole rigging and used some empty Game Objects instead. It fulfills its job for this task as it should do, but I am very dissatisfied that I haven’t a solution for Blender exports.
