#EndOfYearProject

[danielstuddert-blog]

Animating Silva

More progress on Silva, the grappling hook platformer our group of 6 are creating for our end of year game design project are building. This time one of the game's artists has been working hard getting the animations done for our protagonist.

Starting with a run cycle:

And then easing into something a little bit more idle:

Now to dust off mechanim and get them working correctly in the game!

[0cyclop0]

#artteacher #drippainting #paintonwood #teach #art #create #endofyearproject

[jesse--field-blog]

Ship Graveyard - How did that ship get up there?

[emma-boo-wearing]

Heading Towards that Alpha Milestone

Backyard Snowdown is well underway, our programmers have not stopped to get as much in the game as possible before we hit Beta. Which is great! We now have a fully playable and (dare I say) fun game to work on. 

Main Mechanics:

The most important aspect to Backyard Snowdown is the snowballs. They can be thrown directly at the other players to inflict damage, or (and don’t ask for the logic) they can ricochet off anything except other players to hit their mark.

Backyard Snowdown is an imagination-fueled Snowball fight. One of the main mechanics is a Dash Manoeuvre. Primarily intended as an evasive alternative to standard movement, if you’re unarmed you can dash over the snowballs to pick them up.

[jelliodesign]

Childhood memories can turn up in the most unexpected places. Just need a little imagination and an eBay account. #endofyearproject . . . #diy #doityourself #maker #crafts #artsandcrafts #foundobject #design #foundobjectart #inspiration #designinspiration #toys #kids #kidstuff #playroom

[a-lix]

Lil walk cycle for a scene in my upcoming short movie. Not perfect yet but working on it ! 

[danielstuddert-blog]

Silva Movement Improvements

Been spending some time improving the grappling hook in Silva and adding some new functionality in the hopes that it will make the environment more easy to traverse.

Starting off simply with a reel in and reel out:

Improving the clarity with the targeting by adding an arrow displaying the direction that the player is aiming:

And bringing in some more life to the rope by having it stick to surfaces:

That deadline of November 29th is getting closer and closer and there are still so many things that still need to be done!

[danielstuddert-blog]

Silva: Bring Me a Shrubbery

The groups artists are going in a replacing the silhouettes of objects throughout the game with some final art pieces. Starting with some of the trees in the game.

And also because I haven’t gone this in a while here is an obligatory bug gif of an animated Silva that is not quite there:

Instead of saving the forest, why not just crush it?

[danielstuddert-blog]

Silva: From Concept to Completion

So the due date for Silva has come and gone. The game has come a long way over the last three months from the original concept art:

Then to the grey box with the very bare bones of the mechanics:

Then the art started to come in!

First came the basic silhouettes of everything starting to show the setting from the original concept work and the mechanics beginning to fall into place as the 1st milestone, alpha came and went:

Then beta came around with more art and better swinging:

And finally, finally came the project end with everything in and working!

We got there in the end through all of the roadblocks and the final result is something I am proud of. Only thing left to do is collate my thoughts and waffle on about them a little.

More Soon!

[danielstuddert-blog]

Presenting to Industry

The second, and final, presentation for this module has come and gone. This time we were up pitching our game to people currently working in the games industry.

This was the major feeling that was running through the group as we ran through practising our presentation those few last times. 

Though the nerves quickly melted away when we found that our game was received well overall by the panel who had some warnings of making sure that the artists and designers worked together closely to make sure that the art does not slow down the design and vice versa, making sure we telegraph the difference between things you can and can’t grapple to very clearly as well as one large thing that made the group as a whole go OH that makes complete sense.

And that was the interaction between the player and the vision cones.

Referring back to the stealth idea of the game, something that because the word causes more confusion than anything we have dropped, one of the major parts of stealth is the ability for the player to recover from mistakes so there should be an amount of time that the player can pass through the vision cones of the enemies.

This amount of time will allow not only for the player to recover from slight mistakes, but it also enables us to create some instances where the player can be forced to quickly just zip through vision cones allowing us to have more options for level design.

It was an amazing, if somewhat daunting experience having people who work in the industry that you are seeking to join critiquing your team’s hard work and just makes me even more inspired to succeed!

[danielstuddert-blog]

Conegraphs: Telegraphing Cones

Just a quick little Silva development update. One of the main mechanics of the game is avoiding the vision cones of the game's enemies.

One bit of feedback we were getting from initial testers was that they felt like they were just dying out of nowhere when it came to the vision cones.

To improve this problem we added a little bit of transparency on the cones inner workings.

As the player remains inside the vision cone it will quickly fill with another colour and when the first yellow cone is filled in its entirety the player will then die and be sent back to the last checkpoint they have passed.

A lot of work still to be done, so expect another update soon!

[danielstuddert-blog]

Controller Conundrums

So one thing we have noticed while developing Silva is that people have been divided on how they prefer to swing through the game. Is one controller stick enough to aim and move or should we go for two?

So this week the group did some testing to see how people felt about the controls schemes and the results? A slight preference towards the two stick scheme and that people when they have their preference have quite a large dislike of the other controller setup.

So the team's final verdict? Why not both?

[danielstuddert-blog]

Making Menus

The team and I have been starting work on the menus for Silva, the grappling hook platformer and here is what we have put together so far for the game’s main menu:

Each of the buttons are animated when the player has them selected and the camera in the background slowly pans across the opening section of the game’s level.

Still a lot of work to be done and that final deadline is coming quicker than any of us could have imagined! But with a lot of work coming out from all of the disciplines that means more to show off so expect more soon!

[danielstuddert-blog]

Really Selling It

Part of the Industry panel presentation is creating and printing a sell sheet for the game we are making, so this is just a quick show off post for what the team has put together.

Front:

Back:

And be sure to follow us over on Twitter at https://twitter.com/silvathegame for some more bite-sized project updates!

[danielstuddert-blog]

The Animation of Silva

With Silva in development, I thought that now would be a good time to talk about how our art inclined people are going to deal with the animations of the game.

Since the game is based around 2D handpainted sprites we had a couple of options available to us and we eventually decided upon going down the road of rigging and animating as if they were paper dolls instead of doing an animation sheet for each sprite. 

We have to treat them a little differently than you would your typical 3D model and have to break them up into individual sections so that the rig can be correctly applied.

But after this has been correctly setup artists can just animate the sprites in the same manner as any other rigged model.

More soon!

[danielstuddert-blog]

Placing Parallax

So far a lot of the gameplay shown of the Silva, the 2D grappling hook platformer has been shown with a lot of emptiness in the background, where it is meant to be set in the middle of a forest.

So some of my work this week has been implementing the art that the group’s artists have been making to fill out the world.

Read on if you would like to know a little more about how it works.

The parallax system works in a similar way to Michal Berlinger’s post on Gamasutra Combining Perspective and Orthographic Camera for Parallax Effect in 2D Game where the main camera in the game only sees the pieces of the level that the player character can interact with and the paralax layers themselves are handled by two seperate cameras one for the foreground and another for the background, which only see the paralax objects themselves. 

From here it allows artists and designers to place the parallax objects in 3D space to give the effect seen above

Here is how a section of the level looks like in the Unity editor in 2D vs how everything is in 3D