Devlog 5: Production Sprint 1 - Middle

Programming

Ball breaking and respawning

So i have been working on this physics simulation and rigidbody dynamics thing, and i have made some pretty cool progress. Our latest version includes a baby inside a ball that reacts to collisions when the ball breaks.

But let me tell you, this one was tough. We're still dealing with some issues with the baby since it's set up as a kinematic rigidbody. It's not moving the way we want it to in response to physics forces.

To try and get around this problem, we're experimenting with using a dynamic rigidbody for the baby. We're also trying out different properties to make it behave more realistically.

We're all pretty determined to make this simulation as engaging as possible. It's challenging, but it's also really exciting to see what we can accomplish.

Obstacles

To provide players with an engaging and dynamic gameplay experience, my team and I have been working on introducing a variety of different obstacles in our game. Currently, i implemented three different obstacle types that spawn at dedicated spawn points. However, we plan to introduce even more obstacle types in the future, including ones that change in height.

We believe that having a diverse set of obstacles will make the gameplay more interesting and challenging for players. To ensure that each obstacle type provides a unique challenge, we are working on fine-tuning their difficulty levels and ensuring that players must use different strategies to overcome each one.

Death mechanic

have implemented the beginning of a death mechanic. At this stage, players are not able to shoot yet, as we are still working on fine-tuning the balance of the game to ensure that the death mechanic is both engaging and fair.

We understand that balancing a game can be a difficult task, especially when it comes to introducing a death mechanic. However, we believe that it is important to provide players with a challenging experience that keeps them engaged and motivated to improve.

To balance the game, we are currently exploring different ways to make the death mechanic engaging without making it too punishing for players. This involves testing different difficulty levels, obstacles, and other gameplay elements to ensure that players have a fair chance of succeeding in the game.

Art

Texture BaseTrack

The process of creating a base track texture is an important step as it sets the base for all the other textures of the other obstacles.  The chosen design, which resembles a stone path, is intended to fit with the game's overall color scheme. Additionally, it's worth mentioning that golden chains will be added to the sides of the track later on, providing the illusion that the track is being held up from above. 

It's been mentioned that the texture was designed with a tileable property in the horizontal direction. This is an important consideration, as it allows for the track to be extended indefinitely without noticeable seams. 

Obstacles

The team responsible for creating obstacles in the video game has completed the placeholders for each of the obstacles. These placeholders will allow programmers to begin implementing the obstacles into the game's code, ensuring that the game's functionality works correctly. 

While the placeholders for all the obstacles have been created, only a few of the obstacle models have been fully finished at this point. The vortex, trampoline, ramp, jump, and startpiece are the ones that have been completed. The next step for the team is to unwrap the finished models and create textures for them.

Track Generation

The track is semi-automatically generated using a houdini tool. This tool uses some user inputs like a curve to define the flow of the track and a prefab to randomly place the obstacles. Next to those, a parameter interface allows for easy tweaks like the LOD strength, smoothness, optimisation features, collision generation etc.

However, even though the previous part is fully automatic, the houdini tool can not process the start mesh, end mesh and height-changing obstacles. This means the start and end must be placed in manually and these special obstacles will have to be placed by hand with the track being separated at each of these.

LOD and collision generation has now been stabilised making the result a lot more optimised than the previous convex collision.

The smoothing technique has been downgraded to a more simple version until the advanced way has been stabilised. This means the prefabs can get placed on a curved part making it a little tougher to find the exact right parameter.

Sound

Hey, Sound designer of the Rollin' rascals team here. After getting majorly stuck with figuring out how to get the specific sounds I wanted to make I've finally been able to do some work after some help. During  the second week of the first sprint I've been working on adding some of the basic sounds that the player character creates for certain actions which will give the actual player auditory feedback when they perform those specific actions and will continue working on implementing these sounds together with newly created ones for the next week of this sprint.