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.

Breaking the Bridge

The game consists of many traps, one of which being a broken bridge which breaks after a certain amount of time of the player being on it. This was a pretty simple coroutine mechanic. It works effectively and it is timed well enough to give the player a chance to stand on it and recognize that it would break. We added two of these in game, one with just a platform beneath, but the second has traps underneath, testing the players mentality to remember the mechanics of our game.

Score

This is a simple set of scripts that give the effect of score to the player. It adds a sense of completion to the game, other wise it would just be a race to the finish, which we didn't want from the game, we wanted the player to feel compelled to collect all the eggs and as many coins as they can. Although, we found the coins to be a useless score, and a few testers of the game found it to be too difficult. Rather than re shape the game to make it easier, I decided to make it so when you hit 250 coins, it automatically takes it out of your "bank" and adds a life, I originally set it to 100 coins for 1 life, but I found that players were finishing the game with extreme amounts of life points.

 

 

Environment Items

For the art style of Dragon Run, objects are done mostly in flat hard brush which is then sculpted into the desired shape. Line work is used only for details and uses usually a darker colour to the one previously used. I felt using blue for shading preserved some vibrancy and melded well with the lighting on the rest of the object. The trees were designed to occupy the mountain regions with small patches of lush grass accompanying them. 

In particular it gave a more three dimensional effect to rocks. 

Additionally, i also designed a snow level in the case that we were able to add a third level to the game with enough time. It used a similar style of rock formation to the mountains with an added icy aesthetic. 

A scale comparison between the character and the environment using an animation sprite by Yazmin. The sprite was colored and shaded to incorporate it into the scene, 

Dragon animations