Vinyl, Controllers and Art

This week my main focus was getting UI art from Alice into the game.  It took much longer than expected mostly because it was tying functionality into the artwork and not just getting it to display.  The speedometer in particular was the most challenging since I had to figure out how to set and rotate around a pivot in Unity.  In addition to that the scratch bar functions identically as before, but looks far nicer.  It has a new button icon to let the player know how to use it, which goes away once they hit E the first time.  There's also a new bar to track progress through the song, so that it's easy to tell where in the song you are.

On top of getting all that working I also added controller support to the game, which was a pretty easy task.

Vinyl, Now With Score!

I'm on a roll here, 2nd week in a row I kept reminding myself to blog and forgot to.  Last week was a pretty productive week for me as well.

The main thing I worked on was implementing the "History of Vinyl" bar visual (temporary for us to test with) and functionality, which functions as our score for the game.  Playing well will increase the audio quality and visuals and vice versa.  In the end the bar won't be visible at all so that players will hear their score.  Hitting obstacles decreases your score, while hitting filters, looping successfully, and avoiding obstacles gives you score.  One future change might be to add a streak mechanic where avoiding obstacles without hitting any increases how much they're worth.

I also implemented a scratch resource so that you can now only scratch for 20 seconds.  This will likely be a number based off the length of the song and we're also thinking of adding a collectible that would slightly replenish this resource.

Finally, I also made it so that instead of our singular obstacle we now have three distinct ones so that they can all behave and look different.

Vinyl, Looping and Mesh Optimization

Oops, forgot to blog what I did on Vinyl last week so here it is a little delayed.

The main thing I did last week was to get the visuals of the looping to work.  Before the needle would just teleport to how far away from the player it was supposed to be.  Now it continues to move away from the player and then pulls back at the end of each loop.  This visual really goes along with the audio very well and helps the player to understand exactly what's going on.  There's still a bit of fine tuning that needs to be done on it for certain edge case fail states, which I plan to finish off this week, but it's in a very good state now.

The other task I took on since I needed more things to do was to make it so that the entire track mesh wasn't drawing the entire time.  Previously with an hour long song the entire mesh, several sub-meshes really, would be created on loading the song and displayed for the duration of the gameplay.  Now I've made it so that only the sub-mesh the player is on and the ones boarding it will be visible.  This has less impact on shorter songs that will likely only have three sub-meshes, but will drastically cut down the number of verts that we're drawing on much longer songs.

The last and smallest task I had was to completely remove the power bar since we decided to no longer use that resource.

Vinyl Gets Particles

This week I worked on adding multiple particle effects to the game in our attempts to get the game to look less programmer-y and more along the lines of what we're shooting for.  Obviously I'm still a programmer and not an artist at all, but at least now the particle systems are set up and ready for the artists to test out materials on.

Two of the particle effects I added are fairly similar, they're for the chorus filter and looping "walls" the player runs into to trigger the effect.  They're colored differently to make it very easy to distinguish between them, but the chorus filter's one also has a lot of movement involved whereas the looping one is stationary since it stops you for the looping effect.

Additionally I made a particle effect on the player itself that activates when you pass through the chorus filter and lasts for the same duration as the audio effect  We had this in the prototype as well and really liked how well the two worked together, it drives home that synesthesia feel we're going for.  The particles shoot out from behind the player in a cone and since we're now using a momentum based movement system, you can fling the particles around which looks pretty awesome.

Aside from that I also added more control schemes to the game as opposed to just WASD.  I feel like we should have a configuration scheme in an options menu where a user could select which scheme they want, but I suppose just having four options works too (IJKL, arrow keys, and 8456).  Everyone called me a nerd for putting IJKL in, but I still remember using that ages ago.