Hello there!

It's been a while, hasn't it? Well, Easter break happened, but this doesn't mean we didn't do anything during that time! In fact, we've got some nice work to show you!

Let's get right to it, shall we?

Sound (New!)

We finally implemented the first sounds! The players have some basic movement sounds and there is jazz playing in the background. We're going to try and record all the sounds ourselves, but if we don't find good sounds for every action we'll get the rest off the web. Though that is plan B of course :)

The Code

A lot has changed since last devlog 3 weeks ago;

The level loading

We now have a seamless loading screen form one level to the other, 
whenever the player reaches the end of the level a transition will play and the next level will load,
for now that all there is for the level loading but once we have a post level screen also that one will be displayed at the end of a full level,
and the transition will only be used to go from one part of the level to the other.

Platforms

We now also have 2-way platforms; so in other words a platform you can climb on top of from under and can fall trough if you wish to.
This will allow some creative puzzle making in combination with swinging the other player with the rope.

Wall Jump

There are now separate walls on which you can preform a wall jump, these walls have a different colour to make it clear where and when you can preform a wall jump, to give more time and to make it easier to preform skill based tricks there's is also a wall slide when moving in to one of these walls.

Better rope visualization

Oh didn't you know? you can now dynamically change the size of the rope, while the current key bindings for the action aren't the best yet, there is a clear visualization while changing the lengthening and shortening the rope; in other words you can clearly see the size of the rope changing while still staying perfectly functional!

A better camera

The camera now also takes in to account how far the players where from each other, and will dynamically zoom accordingly.
This makes sure both players are always visible, and gives a more clear view over bigger levels where the players will be further apart.

The dash

The dash is now also properly implemented, so the small guy can dash around, again allowing more creative puzzles, and giving the small guy his special ability. (:

The Art

Particles

Let's start with the particles, who could forget about those? When the player presses any movement key we made an animation of smoke/dust flying away.  To put particles in Unity we make a particle system. This is still in the making but when it's working the particles can be added to the game and will make playing it a lot more interesting.

Foreground

New foreground elements were made! The scale had to be adjusted and the colors were too bright in the beginning. When having the full  level we can puzzle them on the sides and make it look good. To save space we combined two elements in one drawing so you can just rotate the object in Unity and  have something different!

Background

The background also got some changes. The parallax effect is when a player move across the screen we see some new backgrounds but it's actually different layers moving at a different pace. We only use one layer but with this effect we can make sure it gets loaded when the player moves there. The code for this is still in the making  but the moment it works we will adjust the backgrounds to a neutral seamless targa in the right colors.

Main menu

Main menu and UI are designed and we started on the main menu. We go with soft colors and in the background see already a small part of the game. Next to that we still need the UI and a choose the player menu.  Those 2 already have some sketches of what we want, so we just have to make it at this point.

Characters

As you will have seen from last time, we still needed to make 2 animations for P1; the dash animation and the rope pull animation. 
These are now also made!

However, we didn't change the rope pull animation. It wasn't going the way we wanted and we also realised we'd have to make multiple versions of this animation, as the characters would always be able to pull eachother in any angle possible. This would be a LOT of work for an animation we didn't even really like in the first place, so, we decided to change it into a Whistle/Call animation! 

Doing this instead means we don't have to make 10 different animations for the same thing + our 2 characters can have another different animation! 1 Whistles, the other throws a calling gesture, keeping both characters different from eachother and matching their own look.

Here's our Dash animation for P1!

And here's the Whistle/Call animation:

These are obviously still sketches, but now that the animations themselves are created for P1, The work of cleaning everything up should go quite smoothly!

We've also been working steadily on player 2's character, but he's proven to take a bit more time! His Idle animation is fully cleaned up and in the game now, the rest is being worked on.

The next 2 weeks are our last 2 weeks of production, so we'll be working hard to get all our mechanics and levels finished by then!

See you next week!