#sproutgame

With the release of Unity's PlayStation Mobile support, I think it's time to bring Sprout to the Vita! I just got it working today with controls and all :)

It will take me a little while to get some of the kinks worked out, but it's actually working surprisingly well right out of the box.

Some things I need to address include:

- frame rate hiccups

- object pooling (there are issues instantiating objects right now)

- lights and transparency on some objects need to be fixed

I'm currently uploading a new build for Sprout's Indiecade submission and I figure it's a good time to do a quick update!

So after taking some time away from Sprout, I got back to it this weekend! I finally tackled some problems I had been mulling over for quite awhile such as...

Jumping

For the longest time, I excluded any kind of jumping from the game. There weren't really any platforms to necessitate it so it just kind of seemed fine... but there was always this nagging feeling that I should be able to make the character hop around like the adorable little thing it is.

After forcing that feeling from my mind, I came upon another problem: I needed sprout to be able to dig up mushrooms, but the character has no arms! After trying out a few animations (like kicking) nothing really seemed to feel right as a form of mushroom extraction.

After talking with someone about the problem, they (of course) said, "Why not just jump on mushrooms?" And my foolish response was something along the lines of "If you can jump on mushrooms, people will think they can jump on enemies too..." and then suddenly it dawned on me that jumping could actually solve all my problems. Well, maybe not ALL of them, but at least quite a few.

For awhile I was trying to funnel a lot of the gameplay through the singing mechanic. It was an attempt to keep things as simple as possible. A noble quest, I think, but in actuality, it just made everything more confusing. A lot of the actions (such as killing enemies) didn't make much intuitive sense and ended up making the gameplay feel convoluted and forced.

SO, long story somewhat short, jumping is now the method by which the player eliminates enemies and collects from mushrooms. Also, it's just fun to bounce around :)

Player Agency

Since I started this game, there has always been a problem with players having little-to-no agency over what kinds of seeds they are presented with. The initial game only had seeds randomly falling from the sky. This system, unfortunately, allowed players to get stuck far too easily.

Then, I added mushrooms to try to reduce some of the randomness. The colors you get are still somewhat random, but are weighted toward the player's current inventory need. This got me like 68% of the way there. The problem was that, while the player may have zero red seeds in her inventory (making this the most likely mushroom to appear), she may actually need yellow seeds for one of the flowers in the area.

So, I knew the answer is that the player should have some way to choose what kinds of seeds she gets, but I just didn't know how I was going to implement it. What I ended up going with is this:

There is now a little grub farmer at the end of the level. If you feed him a yumyum (a form of currency) he will give you a seed of your choice. Just jump to hit the button on the ceiling and out pops a seed from his bag!

The scariest thing now is that I have yet to test this system with other people :/ But I'm going to get on that right away! The introduction of this new system meant that I had to rebalance the whole game (which it desperately needed anyway). So I did all that balancing tonight so it's ready for people to play! Woo!

I know this post was rather text-heavy, so here's another image:

Just found some early concepts for the Sprout character from Ludum Dare

Well, I got a lot of stuff done yesterday! But there is still plenty more where that came from. So here's a quick update so I can get back to it.

Enemies

I added enemies to the game yesterday. They basically just seek out growing plants and lock them down to prevent them from growing. The player can sing at these evil creatures to repel them and save her flowers! There's no art for the little guys yet, and things went a little TOO well with their implementation... so I'm bound to run into something. I did run into this bug:

It actually wasn't that bad to fix, but I laughed pretty hard when I saw it. There was basically a timer who's value was WAY too low.

Lighting

Spent some time on getting the lighting to change with the progression of the day. Looks pretty sweet. Here's a sped up version:

All the sprites in the scene are affected by a directional light, except for the player character. It has two point light attached to it: one that's persistent and provides slight shading to the character and one that slowly gets more intense as the day progresses. There was a problem where the character would get too dark at night, so adding the little halo underground did wonders for that.

Oh yeah, at there's a new tile set I created! It's definitely inspired by the art I previously had in there, but the colors are a little richer and I added some gradients to things.

Singing

I've had this in for awhile now, but I changed the way the player sings. It used to be just holding down a button, but that wasn't very much fun and felt like a waiting game more than anything. So now I'm trying out something akin to guitar hero. When the player starts singing, little notes fall from the sky. You have hit the corresponding buttons in time to successfully sing a note.

Unfortunately, it doesn't go to music yet (and I'm not sure it will for awhile), but it's still a more interesting interaction than it was before.

Mushrooms

You might notice a few mushrooms in these videos. Those are now a source of seeds for the player. There was previously a big problem where the player didn't have any control over which color of seeds she was getting. I initially made something where she could sing to a seed "dispenser" to spend happiness and pop out seeds, but it felt REALLY bad to spend happiness. As a player, it was difficult to tell when it was worth it. So now, mushrooms spawn underground and the player can shovel them. The spawning system for the mushrooms pays attention to the player's inventory needs and tries to provide support there. This system doesn't quite add the kind of agency I was looking for, but it works well for now.

Sprite Masking

One more win on the visual side is that I got a sprite masking shader working, so I can actually do curved stems for the flowers! Looks much better now.

I decided that I want to submit Sprout to Indiecade and, specifically, I want to submit it for the May 15 deadline. It's quite a stretch, but apparently it would give me a shot to show the game at E3. Not sure there's much chance of that, but it certainly doesn't hurt to try.

So, the next 10 days or so will be dedicated to making the game fun. Here's a quick list of some things I want to try to work toward that goal:

Make the singing action slightly beat-based

Give players more agency over which seeds they get

Add enemies that stop plants from growing

Multiplayer

This is certainly not the whole list, but I can't quite remember it all offhand at the moment. Some of these things are larger than others, and I doubt they will all be in for the May 15 deadline, but it's really just about prioritization (and player testing) now!