Golems
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| Corrupted |
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| Uncorrupted |
The idea of the golems was that they are to an extent, the indigenous species that inhabits this forest, and as a way of signifying that something went wrong here some of the golems exhibit tentacles that have burst outwards through their eyes and appendages.
GUIs
So Far I'm having problems with the GUIs but they still function in the game. The idea with the houses that the player can jump on to is that information will be given to them about the level and the backstory by someone inside, leading up a character in a hidden location the player would have to search for. I'm still struggling with the code as I want it to nay appear when the character is in proximity to the houses, but right now they work fine enough since they are positioned in a way where they are only visible to the player when they next to them.
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| Words as 2D sprites and UIs |
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| GUI Script (A failed script) |
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| Additional Testing |
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| GUI Testing |
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| Text Captions |
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| Character Blue |
Applying Light
Okay, I really hated that new colour. Sure its easier to see but other than that its really quite dull. I was resigning myself to this new abomination of a colour when I remembered a lighting tutorial I'd looked at a while ago. At the start of this project I'd experimented with lighting but found it unnecessary as the colour of the sprites indicated light fine by themselves. However I tried it out again in hopes of having an alternate to the colour scheme of the intractables. The result was a resounding success in which I could increase the visibility of individual assets as opposed to having to rely on pallet swapping.
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| Less Illuminating Test |
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| Better Light |
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| In Lue of Light |
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| Applying Light |
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| Illumination added without Light Source |
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| Illumination Material |
Making things lighter through color
I'd been told that my game was looking too dark, Thats sort of the point given the theme, but I can see where they're coming from. Theme or not no one wants to play a game they can't see, so with this in mind I went back and recoloured the intractable sprites in hopes that they might be more visible.
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| New Color |
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| Overveiw |
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| Bridge Blue(Grey) |
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| Bridge Red(Grey) |
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| Changing Colors |
New Skybox
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| More PlayTesting |
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| PlayTesting |
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| Back Screen |
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| New Skybox |
Bosses, where would we be without them
I had drawn this guy a long while ago but its only now that I added him to the game. The idea is that he's made of the same material as the intractable images the player has been moving around on, except that its alive indicated by the glowing white lines on its body. Incidentally this guy is the reason why the people disappeared if you happen to be swear of the backstory I gave this thing. I had wanted to animate his hand moving across the screen that the player would have to jump over, however the hand animation I eventually ended up with was reeeeally bad and while the sprite sheet is still in the game I don't think I'm going to use it.
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| Adding Golem but not using Golem |
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| Golem SpriteSheet |
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| Animating Golem |
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| Golem Positioning and Audio |
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| Golem Concept |
Teleport/Death
Well I have a working level now, it nearly drove me crazy, but I have one. Coding has never really been my strong suite, in fact being dyslexic I'm told that my mind actively works against this sort of thing. If thats true then I'm feeling particularly proud of myself today for finally cracking it. The idea was basically to have the player teleport to a location when he hit a block, so that when they hit the lower block at the end of each drop they'd restart the level. For a while I was actually operating with a working code but the problem was that it was made with 3D colliders in mind instead of 2D colliders, it was only by chance that I happen to glance at a site with OnTriggerEnter2D that gave me the idea to just add 2D to the end certain parts of the code and even then I didn't think it was working properly until someone else had a look at it. The result however works well, essentially at this point I now have a working level that loops in on itself.
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| Failed Code 2 |
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| Failed Code 1 |
Audio in all its Stereo Glory
Similar to the assets adding audio went very smoothly it spite of the amount of time it took. I ended up with three sound-clips, the first was one of the few forest sounds I was happy with without me having to purchase it. The second was one of those ominous wind files for the bridge part of the level and the first half of the ruins, and the last was a sound a came up with by clipping and editing the sound of someone breathing through a tube. The last one was made as sound for the golems I intend to add later, and as way to lead into it I had the sounds fade grow in volume as the player walked closer to it of further away. I'd tried to edit the other two sound files so that they would loop without there being a gap as the audio file played again, however it seems theres a gap regardless as it repeats which only sounds more jarring the way I edited them so I just went with what I had
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| Creating/Editing Audio Clips |
The last part of the Level
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Following in the footsteps of the ruins I'd done before, These buildings were in the same vain as the last. Mostly all I did was add then then kept playing around with their position so it would be compelling for the player as she/he fell pat or walked past. I must I'm glad I came up with that backstory first, so far its served as pretty good guide when I was drawing these assets.
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| More Playtesting |
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| PlayTesting |
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| Lowest Level |
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| Arranging Background Pillers |
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Shaping Background Screens
The screens were created to give the background further depth behind the assets hat were already there and the basic rules I gave the others apply here. The trees actually took longer that the ruins, I'd started out just smashing together trees I'd already created in photoshop but somewhere along the way it kinda morphed into its own unique thing with additional limbs and shapes. The ruins was simply drawn and added, I'm going for more of a temple city vibe for these buildings so there all gonna be interconnected with a heavy emphasis on pillars.
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| Playtesting |
Ending Ruins
Creating the ruins was the same basic deal as the forest although as I'm now dealing in buildings as opposed to branches and leaves, things have become somewhat simpler. I've definitely got this down to a rhythm here so its just a matter of drawing and arranging. This will be the last part of the level and to reflect that I'm going to have the player jump down a large drop before reaching these last few sections of ruins. The transition will have to rely on information the game will give the player in order for he/she to know whether or not to make the jump, I'm thinking either GUIs on houses I created earlier or perhaps present the player with a platform to jump to but will ultimately be too far for them to reach and they'll fall.
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| Rearranging Assets |
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| Drop 5 |
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| Drop 4 |
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| Drop 3 |
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Drop 1
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Making the Bridge
Unless you read the brief backstory I gave to my level layout you may think this bridge a little too over designed, or if you did read the story too under designed. Execution wise this will serve as the connection between forest and endgame ruins. One thing I may have to fix is its length, I want the player to notice the bridge and its relevance but there is a small chance it goes on for too long. We'll see.
It is worth noting however, that someone asked me a while ago what the theme of my backstory is and after mulling over it for a while I went with death. It had been in the back of my mind (for a while I was operating under "fear of the unknown") and I rather morbidly pinned it down with this term. It makes sense looking back at the project retroactively. Decaying ruins of a once mighty civilization, trees work as a nice visual metaphor for the cycle of life etc.. but bearing in mind that when the player falls into the dark fog only to end up back at the start of the level the theme suddenly becomes that more poignant. The player starts the level where things are at their most light and colorful and has no choice but keep proceed through the motions of the level, descending gradually untill things become darker and darker and eventually everything just fades to black before returning to the beginning and starting the game afresh. At any point in the game the player can jump down one of the many drops ending the level sooner only to pop back right where they started. Over the course of the level the background assets transition from simple to complicated as more of them show up, only to become somewhat streamlined and easier to follow towards the end, and the player is given the illusion that they have some sliver of control over these events through the mechanics but must inevitably tread this path again and again, always descending into the unknown. I'm probably overthinking things again but then I might as well overthink something I came up with myself.
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| Bridge Blue |
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| Bridge Red |
Next part of the Level
With the main parts of the first section of the level firmly established, the next task on the agenda was shaping the clearing. This essentially just meant adding some more colliders and coming up with some new sprites, but as I hadn't used much of my pitch black foreground trees I figured I might as well use them to establish the transition from one section to the next. What I ended up with was a large clump of sprites that gave the illusion that the player was walking through a bush or something instead of trees but it gets the job done.
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| Forest Clearing |
More Background Props
Not much to say about this one really, other then Its nice to have more variety in the background. Actually I will say that its becoming a lot easier to apply these assets after going through the whole tree fiasco, probably because I'm now adapt enough at sorting layers to anticipate the problems I had before or perhaps I'm just overpraising myself for adding a bunch of blocks, either way the are now some more ruins in this forest.
Trees, Trees and Trees
This has been by far the most tedious part of the project so far (actually figuring out code has been the most tedious part but I knew that would be difficult going in so personally I don't count it). Firstly I had to redraw the the branches, I had originally intended to draw them to look a lot more true to life like I had in my initial design concept but instead I ended up with something a lot more curvier and some of them where not looking smooth enough. The lighter colors I decided where unnecessary and would just end up making the scene overly complicated. Then came the actual positioning of them. Its taken a long while to get here but at the time it seemed like this part would go on forever, mostly due to the fact that the sprites would keep clipping in to one another as the player moved past them. The sorting layers where my saving grace here, but after each tree and branch was given its respective layer where they would no longer jump in and out of each other, positioning them again became an issue as I now had to rearrange them with their distance to the camera in mind (darker trees in front of the lighter ones), so all of them had to be redone in the sorting layers after the re-positioning.
So far I have three groups of assets which includes the intractable one that the player can jump on and collide with, the first layer of background trees and a layer of lighter trees behind that one. The intractable layer and the first layer of trees also have additional sprites such as a house partially hidden by trees and ruined towers in the distance. some of the collisions had to be rearranged to adjust for the camera and what I wanted the player to be able to see. Overall I'm ready to move on at this point but it is nice the level start to take shape (the storybook vibe is beginning to look more like a pop-up book).
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| Rearranging Collisions |
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| Playtesting with new Assets |
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| Redoing Trees |
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| Trees Added |
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| Arranging Trees 2 |
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| Arranging Trees |
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| Sorting Layers |
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| Adding Background House (Because why not) |
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| Adding Trees |
Adding Fog (a picture of fog that is, not the tool in Unity)
It had occurred to me pretty early on that as the player would be traversing platforms set high up (relative to the game) the falls and drops would have to be visually interesting as well. I was thinking of how I would arrange the trees to achieve this when I decided to add fog or darkness of some sort to mask the lower parts of the level whilst simultaneously adding a nice visual affect wherein the player gradually disappears as he falls. Achieving this was actually fairly straightforward, I'm aware that there's a built in aspect of unity that could pull this off but as I'm not exactly the most knowledgeable person when it come to this program what I did was basically create a gradient with a transparent layer in Photoshop and match the color with my character so that he would blend into it as he fell, It works pretty well with the whole red scarf thing. To build on this effect I added a solid black screen and placed it behind the other so that level would fade into darkness before the player would as he fell (I think "Limbo's" influence has started to rear its gloomy head).
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| Finalizing Darkness |
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| Applying Darkness |
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| Darkness |
Sprite Textures
Whether or not these sprites will work together when there all assembled is hard to say exactly at this point, but actually adding them to the colliers is going smoothly. Half of the level I had already set up solely through collider boxes before I got around to adding the sprites so there was a brief adjustment period before I got into the more natural habit of simultaneously adding the colliders as I added the sprites. The level starts a long walk in which I envision the establishment of the setting, as well as giving the player enough time to get comfortable for what few controls the game has. From there the player must start jumping from platform to platform in order to reach the end, and it was fun adding alternate paths that are indicated by the sprites like in the image below where falling in a certain place actually leads to a lower platform. I was actually thinking of a level from"Crash Bandicoot" when I made that section, but I guess influence is influence. I added the vines and branches mostly for decoration but also because certain platforms such as the houses (the bits with yellowish lights) where floating in mid air and I needed something to hang them with.
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| Adding Images |
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| Images Added |
Drawing the Sprites
Well It took days of none stop drawing but the first batch of Sprites to be added to the game have been completed. Not a whole lot to be said about them really but that took really long time, but since this is part of my grade I might as well talk about the thinking that went into the design. Like I said at the start of this project I'm going for the silhouette/storybookish look with the design so most of them are all block color. The dark blue Sprites are the ones that will cover up the collider's, I wanted a color that was similer to the pitch black of the main character but one that wouldnt swallow him so that he'd be non-visable and I liked dark blue so I went with that.
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| Asset Creation |
You may have noticed that the trees are the only textures split into separate parts with varying colors. Mostly this is because, trees being one of the most visible textures in the game, getting them to look both visually compelling while also allowing them to serve as the yard stick by which the player could measure the distance of the images in the background was pretty high on the priority list when I was drawing them. Limiting myself to just one or two block colors would be a hindrance in this regard, which is why I have more variety when it comes to them e.g single textures made up of both leaves and branches whilst also having those sames leaves and branches as separate textures themselves.
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| Texture Atlas 3 |
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| Texture Atlas 2 |
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| Texture Atlas 1 |
While it was mostly just for fun, the backstory I gave to my level layout was on my mind quite a lot when I was drawing these Atlases. Turns out The aesthetics of silhouette and storybook lend themselves pretty well to the ruins of a tree branch faring civilization that built towers and temples in the middle of a forest. In retrospect having the story serve as the framework for how I drew the sprites did help in creating them and gave me ideas like adding scaffolding to some of the ruins, as though some of the forests inhabitants had started to rebuild their home in the aftermath of whatever happened to cause people abandon this place.
Adding Colliders
The application of collider's has been pretty simple, long.. but simple. The collider's, i.e the platform my characters gonna walk on, was just a black box drawn in Photoshop with a 2D Box Collider attatched. After I had the collider all I had to do was set them up by following the layout I drew. The player won't be able to see these boxes in the finished product due to them being on a layer the camera won't pick up on, either that or the sprite assets will just cover them up.
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| Colliders Setup 1 |
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| Colliders Setup 2 |
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| Colliders Setup 3 |
Level Layouts
Now that I have created a form of intelligence that can run, jump and stand (If I were a god I'd probably be one along the lines of Aergia) I must now design something he can run, jump and stand on. To that end I drew a collection of images that depict what I envision for the level. The idea is that as this is a game built around jumping so the level should be set in an area high above the ground, and the large imposing branches of a towering forest seemed like a good setting.
However, having my character jumping across branches strikes me as something that would very quickly become complicated. The trees would have to be drawn very specifically to match the colliders and I'm not sure how I'd manage the leaves in that scenario. Instead, while the game will be set in a forest, the character will interact with bridges, pillars and generally more rectangular objects.
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| Level Layout 1 |
I quite like the idea of ruins built around the trunks of a large forest and I'm starting to come up with a backstory for it all. The level will be divided into two sections, the first being the more forested area where the buildings are there more for the support of tree houses instead of actual buildings that people live in. The second will be set in a clearing amongst the trees that gives way to large structures and bridges that appear like a city built around the trees. Both will be connected by a large bridge that marks the transition from one section to the other, color coded blue and red respectively (the same red as the characters scarf).
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| Level Layout 2 |
The backstory would revolve around the relationship between the people that inhabit these areas. Something along the lines of.. both the two tribes were decendants of a group of people that came to this place to escape something, and built their huts and tents among the trunks of the trees for shelter. Their plan was not to settle here but to keep moving through the forest to the other side, not wanting to return to whatever place or event that had drove them here in the first place. However the more they progressed into the forest the more it seemed to be endless, no matter which direction the people migrated they couldn't find their way through. The trees towered so high they could no longer find any trace of the sky, just the sunlight that illuminated through the leaves. Eventually they progressed so deep that they lost their way back and became stuck. Finding no alternative to their situation, they decided to start building homes amongst the trees and branches and sent out parties to explore the forest further and find a path to escape with. Time passed and the homes the people originally built had grown into a town of interconnected tree houses. The people had learned to utilize the resources of the forest to construct sturdy structures that enabled them to climb the trees and expand outward. The parties that ventured into the forest had taken to wearing bright red clothes in order to become more noticeable as it was easy to lose oneself among the trees. They had yet to find an exit but had made one noteworthy discovery. The further they ventured the more it became clear that the ground was steadily proceeding downward, they kept progressing further till they came to a clearing. Here in this respite the ground became rocky and doted with large boulders. The boulders had a strange quality to them, rather then being heavy and cumbersome they were instead light and accessible, not only light but strong and sturdy. such a material could not be ignored and the venturers started taking back chunks of them to strengthen their homes. The parties of explorers decided to use the place as staging area for their expeditions into the forest, while the people in the settlement used the chunks of stone they brought back to strengthen their homes and construct buildings that reached the very tops of the trees. Time passed further and the clearing had become second town built out of the rocks and boulders. The people of this area still hadn't found the edge of the forest but with the safety of the clearing, were able delve deeper down into the forest constructing towers as they went to climb back up towards the clearing, curiously no matter how much stone they hewed from the ground beneath them they never seemed run short of their supply. Meanwhile the people of the original settlement, having expanded to the pinnacles of the forest, could now navigate their way more clearly through the tress. Time passed even further, and the two areas had expanded in opposite directions to one another. The original settlement had built bridges through the tops of the trees, while the people of the second town had slowly expanded downward deeper and deeper in to the heart of the forest. The two settlements had gradually grown apart from one another but remained connected by a great bridge. Time passed yet again, and the two tribes of people had now grown very distant from one another. The people of the original settlement, utilizing their now mastery of bridges and gangways to move over trees instead of through them, had at long last found their way to the edge of the forest. began sending back messengers to their cousins in the clearing, letting them know that they as a people could finally leave should they choose. no messenger returned however, and after waiting several days they sent out a party of their own to discover what had become of the other tribe and why their messengers hadn't returned. Weeks passed and the people began to slowly migrate out of the forest and were ready to leave it entirely when a single person returned. They asked her what had happened to the rest of the party and what had become of the people of the clearing. She told them that they had made their way to the clearing only to find it abandoned. In search of answers they began exploring what was now a city hewn from stone. The city, she said, seemed to proceed downward as they made their way through it, until light became scarce and was it too dark to venture further. Still curious for answers the group made the decision carry on further, and left behind one member to go back to their people and inform them of what they found. Thusly she made her way back and told her tribe that the last time she saw the rest of her group they were descending a large staircase into the darkness... Or maybe I'm just overthinking a bunch of pictures again. As for the players role in this he or she will be one of the people who left with the main tribe and came back to find out what went down with the red bearing explorers, only now even more time has passed and the whole place is now a lot more decrepit and the people who stayed behind will be the ones who convey this information to the player.
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| Level Layout 3 |
Updated Sprite Sheets
Well after a looong, lonng period of writing its time I return to my main project. As such, heres some more writing. Actually from this point on when I work on this project I'm just gonna grab a few screenshots now and then of what I'm currently doing, add a few notes and put it on to Blog spot as just one big update near the end. That way I won't have to come to screeching stop every steps to update this thing but as too the project itself I've now essentially finished my player sprites. After drawing and redrawing the frames for the new character controller I have now concluded that scarfs are up there with water in terms of "difficult things to draw, let alone trying to show it moving", but I eventually managed to arrange those collections of pixels in to something resembling a cloth flowing in the wind (Albeit strange wind that oddly seems to change direction the exact same time as the controller). The Jump sprite-sheet was done a little differently to the others, I used what is apparently known as a blend tree (but what I call the "Octopus") to manually adjust the point at which each frame plays. (Side note: I was looking at this blog today when I noticed I don't have an image of the fabled "Octopus", at this point in the project I'm long past the animating phase which is why the screenshot of the Blend Tree is from a later stage of the game. Doesn't matter too much, just something I felt like adding in case anyone was wondering.)
I quite enjoyed this section of the project, watching my drawings spring to life and start running across the screen as though hes trying to escape the computer was pretty satisfying. It was a simple enough task to replace the new sprite sheets with the old one but I might have to return to the running sprite sheet at some point. As it stands now his left leg seems longer than his right, Its not game-breaking but it is noticeable. I'll see how stacks up when the rest of the game is built. oh, and I also added a skybox, it reflects the games working title of "Dusk".
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New Character Controller |
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Skybox Dusk |
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| Running Cycle |
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| Jumping Cycle |
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| The Octopus |
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| Idle Cycle |
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