Unity Development Part 7

This development session took place at the end of week 9, with Emilia.

The objectives for this session:

• Final platform composition, accounting for challenge and enough variation in height

• Mark where each event (game puzzle) will take place and put in the assets that we have so far

• Considerations, where should the player be standing when they interact with the challenge, where should the blossoms and lantern be for each puzzle and how much space should there be between each puzzle to keep it interesting?

We completed this task over the weekend between weeks 9 and 10 in preparation for a full walkthrough of the game so far to be shared with the rest of the Anima Mundi team. At this point in the project, the player movement and its animations, not including the ability animations, are complete. We have most of the game assets completed such as the blossoms, interesting architecture, puzzle pieces such as the panpipes and puzzle clouds and the eagle animations. Everything I have so far from the rest of the team has been put in so the call on Tuesday will also act as a progress review.

I showed Emilia how to pull assets into unity and use the scene manager and we organised together the shape of the path the player must take, making sure there was some variation in the elevation of the platforms so it is more interesting of a journey. The different puzzles in the game require different amount of space.

For example, the tree restoration puzzle is the biggest event and it involves the player having to move rain clouds using their gust ability over the top of a dying tree to restore it. This is the third puzzle in the vertical slice and is marked in the image blow with the second white square.

The white square shows where the rain cloud needs to be and beneath it, the red square shows the position of the tree. The player really needs to have a higher elevation in the beginning so they can be in a similar y position to the raincloud, and then they can descend downward and along the horizontal axis to where the restoration animation is taking place. Obviously these details are not set in stone and there are other ways to accomplish it but I think that is the simplest and smoothest way to get it done. I want the player to be able to see the impact of their action in real time so it all needs to take place in the same frame.

Above is the full stretch from start to finish and this shot was taken before we accounted for the need for elevation in some of the puzzles. The dip in elevation between the second and fourth puzzle is where I think the eagle should patrol the sky with its music note clue for the final puzzle. This gives more than enough time for the player to pay attention to it and recognise the clue.

A blossom will be placed near enough to each puzzle that when it is completed the lantern will visibly be switched on to show that achievement. Other than those blossoms where the lanterns are hanging from them, we want to minimise how often we are placing them as we do not want the foreground to become too crowded. Most of the beauty in the vertical slice, in that respect, will be made up in the background.

The feedback that was received and the analysis for the progress of the build so far, can be found documented in week 10 of my diary.