Dragon animations - YAZZ

Here is a final design of our dragon :) hes mor of a fatherly figure and is trying to find his babies. I animated him running and tried to make him seem front heavy using a lot of motions and frames.

I had never animated before so a lot of research and reference was required.

Colouring the dragon, frame by frame. 

In the game you have the option to "fly" for a short amount of time, gliding past traps and other obstacles. 

Idle pose

This animation was intended to be in the game but was sadly removed due to Unity being faulty and not enough time to fix it. Either way the game runs just as good without it.

Finishing Touches

Cameron asked me to redo the game's main menu screen so that it matched the style of the rest of the game. This is the original image that he made.

And this is my repaint of it, I kept the composition broadly the same, and used the same painting process that I've used for the environment assets, with an additional overlay layer to deepen some of the shadows. I'm pretty happy with how it looks, although the drawing style for the trees has restricted how much depth the image has, but I'm not sure how to fix that and keep within the style of the game.

I also made these icons for the UI, again to help keep everything consistent looking.

Animation in Game

Here is the animation of our dragon. Ive made it so the dragon will act idle when ... idle. He will fly only when space is being held and run when left or right is being held, he also flips axis when facing left or right.

 

 

 

Glide

Run

Idle

Levels one and two development

Here are the first two levels of the game, with the traps added. The first level is good, but might be a little too difficult because of the swinging boulders, the second level feels a bit bare in comparison. So I need to develop that further. I want the levels to feel like you progress in terms of the difficulty without it being unfair, especially when there aren't any checkpoints, I don't want the players to give up because they keep having to go back to the beginning of the level when they die.

This i just the levels with the backdrops and props added, there are quite a few things like the rocks, that I ended up not using but I may revisit the look of these levels once I've spoken with the rest of the team. The backgrounds are using a subtle parallax effect that I prototyped earlier in the project.

 

These are the backdrops as one image each, in Unity each layer is a separate png that I have copied across to fit the level.

Update: 12/04/16

I added some clouds to the second level to make it feel more complete, and I made them parallax as well.

Controls Menu and Level Select

These are the two menus I created. I used Heathers background concept and worked upon it to create a menu. For the level select, I added various effects on top to make it appear smoky. I also made the other levels locked to appear like it has more content than we really do.

I also added a control menu as many people, for some reason even with gui on screen telling them controls, still don't know how to play.

Pause/Fail/Death Screens

These are the screens I am working on for the games death/fail screens.

 

The paused menu works well, I encountered a bug where the player could spam the controls while paused, and they would shoot off to the edge of the map, always to the same point. I managed to fix this by disabling the scripts on the player game object when paused, and allowing them when unpaused.

 

Second level assets and initial layout

Because our game is making good progress we've decided to add a second level. I've recoloured some of the existing assets for the next level and once we've built it we can figure out if anything else needs making

To make these I just used an adjustment layer to change the colour of the base rocks and kept the shadows the same, I also removed the grass from a couple of things.

I quickly sketched a layout for the second level and then built it in Unity

I was aiming for something more difficult and reliant on delicate platforming, which I think I've managed but it still needs play-testing by other people and some of the traps need adding.

Traps

I added an animation to the wall, to start making the game feel more finished. I made the animations fine but ran into some trouble with scripting it, because I haven't scripted in so long that I'm a bit rusty. So I ended up getting some help, and got it working, it would possibly be better to use physics but I'm not sure where to start with that and this method got the job done quickly.

Then I made a falling boulder to flesh out the second level, it's just a new asset with a looping animation applied to it. Getting the timing right took a little fine-tweaking but it's looking good now.

Traps

Ideas for various traps in the game ranged from swinging rocks on vines to vicious living plants. Although the rocks where able to be included, there was some debate on how the plant hazard would work and the fact it would require animation to go along with its chosen form of attack, e.g biting, hitting, projectiles. As such the spikes and rocks where the ones included. The crystals were also instead substituted for the basic spikes as floor traps.

Environment Development and Test

I made a level out of those initial four pieces, it's functional but needs a lot more variety. However I have not been able to play test it so I'm just focusing on the look for now.

I expanded the range of pieces and updated the level.

For putting these assets into Unity I imported the sprite and made a 2D polygon collider, which I then simplified because the automatically generated ones followed the contours of the sprite and were too complicated, then I made each piece into a prefab so that they were easier to work with. It looks better but the pieces don't fit together very well and the style is inconsistent with the other assets I've made. So I remade them and rebuilt the level, again.

I think this looks a lot more cohesive and the painting method I used was a lot quicker and easier to replicate. Putting these in was a lot faster as well, because I just edited the prefabs I already had instead of starting from scratch.

This is the layout after I play-tested and adjusted it to fit the constraints of the player's jump and glide abilities, and the lack of vertical camera movement. It's missing most of the traps/obstacles but still seems fun to play and I received positive peer feedback so I think I'm onto the right track with this. Now I need to make more of the assets so that we can get those extra traps and obstacles in game.