Devlog: Week 10
Camera work and More Assets
Hi hi! We’re back for another weekly devlog, this time around I did some asset work, as well as a few final refinements for the camera system to make sure the game feels tight and the controls are smooth.
First up, I’ve been postponing this for a while so I figured it was finally time to update the face textures for our slime buddies!
Ever since we got the camera controls in and ran the android builds we noticed that the textures I initially concocted were far to small and low res for a tiny screen like the one on a smartphone. So I took it upon myself to make a new version with the aim of increasing fidelity for a small viewport with a zoomed-out camera.
To do this, I first looked into using a new Unity feature to import SVG files and generate textures with varying resolutions. Our face textures are now vector image files that can be changed and color-swapped much easier plus they are way smaller in size too! Besides this, the lines are much cleaner and thicker now and since we know that our game uses mainly a top-down 45-degree view, I made sure the new faces were aimed upwards so they are always looking up at us. 😁
Next up, our camera control system got implemented last week but some more work needed to be done to get things exactly the way we want them.
Camera limits are set dynamically based on the size of the board, the zoom is relative to the center of the view and accounts for the camera angle.
This is especially important due to our next addition. We wanted to be able to switch the perspective between a complete 90-degree top-down view (when editing the board) to an angle view for when the simulation is playing.
This not only helps us convey the separation between those two mechanics to the player but also makes it much more comfortable to edit, especially on a mobile device. Plus it looks cool too. So that’s nice.
Finally, I’ve been using my spare time to work on something a little special on the side… I'm not sure whether I will get to sneak this into the game in time or not, but we are getting kind of bored of the plain background… So I figured I would model a 3d scene to spruce it up a bit. I think a messy desk full of engineering gear is the perfect setting for our circuit bards to live.
There are, however, some concerns related to efficiency (even though everything is relatively low-poly) so we might have to be a bit clever about the way we include this in the game. Either way, I think it will help with giving things a bit more personality and it’s been a blast to work on regardless 😎
We are almost nearing the end of the dev cycle and virtual MOJO is just around the corner! Now its time to hit the gas and sprint towards a playable demo that we can show off. Something tells us we have a couple of stressful and busy days ahead of us, so….
Wish us luck!
Bye bye!
