IGF here we are!

Lately I've worked mainly on creating a tutorial level for the game. As part of this I worked on making a little intro that showed a clear day become dark and stormy. I wanted to have the skybox change for this and after searching the web i found this tutorial. http://www.burgzergarcade.com/tutorials/game-engines/unity3d/074-unity3d-tutorial-day-night-cycle-part-3.

This was great! I got the shader and made two skyboxes using the packages that are included in Unity. I then scripted the texture change, and the tutorial now has a nice conversion from cleat skies to stormy skies. I also wanted some realistic looking clouds to converge on each other. I found several particle effects that could do this. I ended up using the ones that one of our artist found. I implemented these affects and the clouds were added into the level.

A major part of the tutorial is to teach the player how to move.I added in messaging and strict controls so that the player goes through the level collecting drops. Pictures appear to show the player how to move in any given direction. It also instructs that drops make you bigger (they no longer have colors) and that globule will change your color (hence the reason why drops don't do it anymore).

The creation of the tutorial also involved main system bugs, such as a problem we were having with collision, splatting, and the camera. I ended up having two cameras in the tutorial. One for the intro and the gameplay camera. I've also created a first person camera earlier that is there but not really in use since the game change.

I also created a loading level for loading between the levels so that weird images weren't appearing on the screen. For this I also implemented a static method for the loading of the levels. This way we didn't have to write multiple lines of code every time we wanted to go from one scene to another. Instead, we just needed to make one line call to the static method, and that took care of the extra work using the load scene transition.

I also added an ambient raindrop particle effect that shows rain falling all around the player. These aren't collectable, but they sure do help you feel like rain.

One thing that has been plaguing this game has been the menu system. I finally went in and changed the functionality of the selection process so that it would actually detect when you selected things on the menu.

After many other bug fixes we were able to submit our game to IGF. Since then I have worked on fine tuning play, changing color pallets for the game so that they follow the standard that was decided by our art lead. I also added analytics to the game so that we can know what is going on when the game is played. I made it so we can see if the player gets stuck at certain locations and how far they are able to progress through the game. We can also see how long it takes them to finish different controls in the tutorial so we can know if it is too hard to master. I've also worked on getting the frames up on the scenes, because they suddenly spiked down to 7 frames per second. Unacceptable. I removed may models from the level and downgraded the level of detail on the trees to get the framerate back up to an acceptable level.