Gull Grab (working title)

A topic by ServantOMallard created Jul 15, 2018 Views: 407 Replies: 9

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This is my first game jam and (hopefully!) my first fully finished game. I'm working on my own using Unity as my engine of choice.

My game will be a 2D endless runner with grapple mechanics for movement. The premise is you play as a guy stranded on an island after a plane crash. To escape you need to windsurf by grappling seagulls and jumping to avoid obstacles. As you travel you can collect currency (coconuts) which can be spent on upgrades.

So far I've only got the planning phase done:

Lots to do!

Cheers all,

Nathan

raycaster746 years ago

Hey Nathan, cool game idea! what are your thoughts about using Trello? have you tried it or something else?

ServantOMallard6 years ago(+1)

Thanks! I figured it's a nice little game mechanic to build the rest of the game around.

As for Trello, I've used it in the past but I much prefer having something physically in front of me. Just my personal preference! As you can tell I've taken inspiration from it though.

ludowoodsHost6 years ago

ahhh i LOVE working with post its on a white board. i did this with a team on a mobile game and it's honestly so satisfying being able to just move cards across the board. also god.... this premise is SO GOOD haha i'm so excited to see this in action.

ServantOMallard6 years ago(+1)

I’d be a lot happier if a few more of them were moving! Yeah I’m definitely going light-hearted for the theme, I’ve got some golden ideas for animations when the seagulls get grabbed 😂

ServantOMallard6 years ago

I’m at work currently so not able to post a full update, I’ll post a more in-depth update later.

Progress is going well:

I’ve got the grappling and jumping mechanics working, I’m onto tweaking values to get them ‘feeling right’.

I’ve also sorted the endless ocean spawning system. It utilises a small Queue of ‘Sea’ prefabs, which are created and destroyed based on the distance the player has travelled.

Next on the list to tackle is seagull / obstacle generation. I’m thinking of having set level layouts as prefabs rather than true random level generation as this will let me tweak things more easily.

ServantOMallard6 years ago

We have a title! To go with the overall sense of humour I'm trying to go for, I present: Grab 'em by the gulls!

I've spent the last few nights ironing out some kinks with the throwing mechanism, I wasn't happy with how it felt. Previously I'd set up a fairly complex system using the cursor's distance from the player, passing it through an animation curve to provide 'decay'. I found it hard to get the balance right, it felt like the player had little control over the throwing power. In the end I've gone for a hold-to-increase-power approach, this will also make it easier to integrate into the upgrade system I have planned.

Overall I'm happy with how it feels now:

You'll have to excuse the placeholder art, which brings me onto my next bit of progress:

I'm going for a Rayman-esque character to make animation a bit easier, using Inkscape as I find it much easier to use than GIMP. I don't think it's too bad considering I'm crap at drawing!

I've been having some trouble with the graphic settings in Unity blurring out my sprites, the usual google-fu hasn't produced a solution that's worked as yet. If anyone has any pointers I'd be very appreciative!

Cheers,

Nathan

ServantOMallard6 years ago(+1)

A short update: I'm now in love with Bosca Ceoil. Main menu music done!

Cheers,

Nathan

ServantOMallard6 years ago

A busy weekend for me!

Artwork:

I've got a lot more artwork done and now in place in the game:

Artwork still to do:

Gull wings
Gull legs
Gull body variants
Player shorts
Player feet
A few GUI elements
Obstacles
Parralax background items
Coconuts!

Mechanics:

I've got the bird spawning mechanics done, the timer is tied to a static PlayerStats class so that it can be affected by upgrades. This PlayerStats class is also referenced for various values in my PlayerController and GrappleController scripts again to facilitate upgrades.

I did a major rework of the player state machine as it was getting annoying working with half a dozen boolean values! I may refactor this again tonight to separate the states out into their own scripts, not sure yet if it's worth the hassle.

I've got a rudimentary main menu, pause menu and GUI up and running. I've also set up an audio manager script to avoid having to endlessly add audio source components to my GameObjects (thank you Brackeys for the inspiration!).

Bug-fixes:

I've managed to squash an issue where the mouse's position was drifting slowly to the left of where it should be over time. It turned out to be because the Camera.ScreenToWorldPoint() method was returning a Vector3 with a different z value than where my 2D items are located.

I also had a pretty funny issue where the gulls would flit between facing left and right indefinitely when grappled, I almost left that one in :-P

ServantOMallard6 years ago

One thing I missed out:

I’ve changed the method I was using to slow down the player over time. Originally I was using the friction settings on the Board and Sea PhysicsMaterials to achieve this but this didn’t give me as much control as I wanted.

I’ve now set these to both be frictionless and have timeTillSlowdown and slowdownRate variables in my static PlayerStats class. These are then used within my PlayerController to reduce the Player’s velocity.

Cheers,

Nathan

itch.io

My First Game Jam: Summer 2018

Gull Grab (working title)