Pangea Golf

Progress report. I wanted to be done with the project by know, even though I knew the deadline was slightly unrealistic it helped me get a lot of the art and mechanics in. Still working away on importing the art and creating and fine tuning mechanical elements. I also had a great friend of start with help on the backgrounds, I think the mood is spot on. Over all behind on schedule my fault but on track to making it way better than before.

Geyser animation. The idea is it will keep pumping away and if the ball lands in it, the geyser builds up and explodes. Need to finished this as a final animation and the next challenge is exporting it in a way that I can manipulate the frames rendered with code. So say I want it to be on pre-burst for 1 second how to hold that frame for X amount of time and make the animation ease into the pause. Anyways we will see. Maybe I am overthinking it. 

Finally the Tortosaurus has finally made into the game, the idea is similar to pin ball, nothing can land and stay on the Tortosaurus. You might hit a good shot but if you hits a Tortosaurus it will ricochet away from the Tortosaurus depending on the angle. On the animation side the Tortosaurus hides away upon impact, but after a while he will emerge again. All up quite happy with him.

Have been working on the foreground for a while now, need a break. And considering a long time ago I was told by a boss, "change is as good as a holiday" started work on the much needed Tortosaurus. This is the initial animation sketch I will go over this with a inking pass, then under paint various tones. Animation its Coding have been the most labour intensive portions of the projects. Though the foreground image has been kicking my ass also.

Adding foreground imagery. And I quickly found out that I need to change my work flow in photoshop to facilitated the same look as before, but now with parallax. When painting a single image you have strict control over every aspect and how soft each edge is and you don't have an issue with having a 50% grey next to 50% grey element of the background, but now due to parallax this may happen. So I have to be more careful around what values I use for each layer in the parallax. Also being ultra careful that the alpha edge not having a light or dark fringe, this becomes extremely evident during parallax.

Finally the character sprite has made into the game, something needed to change with the implementation of the sprite. For example the jump from the idle to the swing was too jarring. So the solution for that was to be use a animation of a swing and lead from the idle, and at the apex of the swing switch to the animation of the swing that can loop endlessly from high power to low power. I have also added the water splash back in, really adds a lot to the context of the water and/or loosing the ball. Starting to look like a game.

Going back and seeing what I can use from the previous character animation. This was one of the most time consuming tasks from the prototype. Really glad looking back that I animated in a much higher resolution than I needed. Some animation frames for the swing will have to change progression order but for most part work. The order change is due to the change in the hit mechanic. The new mechanic ramps the hit up and down, then repeats.

I had to add more to the pausing. One thing was a full screen overlay and also wanted to store the stretched version of the ball and also store the direction it was travelling. Quite happy with the results at the moment. 

image_xscale=2 image_yscale=2 ______________ At the moment for a room that size I am using one 1024x1024 map and 2 1024x512. This may change in the future if its hit the performance. 

Working on getting the pausing to work, at the moment the method is creating a set of variables for horizontal and vertical speed that are being constantly being updates until the start of the pause state. At which point everything gets zeroes out by everything I mean velocity, hspeed and vspeed, gravity, fiction everything. When you un-pause there is a scripted sequences as "un-pause" is a state in and of its self. During the un-pause the  stored vspeed and hspeed is applied to the now stationery ball, gravity is reset to on as is friction and at the very end of un-pause state the pause state changes to not-paused, enabling to be paused again. This so far appear to yelled the best most accurate pause results. By accurate I mean the ball lands in the same location when hit with the power of 40 if never paused or if paused once or a number of times.

Geysers have been one things that everyone who has seen or played the earlier version of this game said it needed to have. Mike Porter was the first person to mention it. And even though I thought it was a great idea I have been putting it of because I though it would be to hard to script. But since I restarted the project, I’m slowly chipping away at all the ideas people have given me. 

To be completely honest I am surprised that this worked. What I needed was a space checker that detects if the ball is close to wall or a cliff. The character sprite will be positioned over X. So I never want the character who is going to be hitting the ball to be standing in a cliff side or with one foot of the edge of a cliff. The idea here is when the “ball” lands two balls are spawned into existence on either side. The a question is asked about their relationship to the ball depending on if they are above, below on on level with the “ball”, the X position jumps away from the cliff edge or wall, subject to if the ball is on top or bottom of cliff. 

Here is a clip of the original prototype up on youtube. The goal is to match this aesthetic with larger more interesting levels. 

Adding the panning camera. First time around changing this was very hard even getting a linear pan to happen. The second time was much faster and I was even able to attach a sin curve ease in and out to the camera pan. Slowly but surely progress.

Working on getting the ball to aim in the direction the ball is travelling and also stretch based on speed. Also pulled the camera back by increasing the view in the room. This was due to the fact it was difficult to make out where the ball was flying to. Additional side note I have also added “turtle” shells from which the ball will bounce and ricochet from and geysers which I am not super pleased with at the moment. 

Adding more functions, one is the power meter that will be linked to animation sprites further down the line and the second is the ability to hit/jump only when landed. Another element is making the camera follow a marker rather than the ball, as now I can adjust the amount of smooth flow I want.