Moth game: Clues

What now?
Most of the mechanics in our game are finished, and we’re getting close to the final deadline. What’s left is polishing the experience of the mechanics, so that the player knows what to do and can feel a sense of progression. One particularily confusing situation players would face in our game was encountering breakable and openable branches. This was clear during beta playtesting, where we would see players bump into the branches, not aware of how to break through. […]

Moth game: Extending the editor

Ineffective solutions
We’re getting dangerously close to reaching the beta milestone of our game, meaning all the features should be done. To show off all the amazing features we need a level. One of those amazing features is a spider that walks along a path and jumps at you if you get too close. One of the problems I set out to solve this week was the difficulty of actually defining the path a spider follows. Until now, the way we made the […]

Moth game: Animator controller as a state machine

Introduction
In my previous posts about this project I’ve been discussing specific features that had been implemented in a short time window prior to the post. The features have then been declared done, only requiring minor tweaks and fixes after the fact. This post is going to be slightly different, discussing a system used to implement several features related to the player. Because the player feature set has been expanded on over several weeks, and is in some areas still being […]

Moth game: Improving the sonar with procedural mesh generation

This week we had our first playtest. Among the feedback we received, there was this idea of having the sonar bounce or stop when it collided with obstacles. This would make sense, since that’s usually how sonars work in the real world, but also because of how it impacts the gameplay. If the sonar can be used to see through everything, there won’t be as many options for how to build in surprises in a level. Blocking the sonar opens […]

Moth game: The sonar

I’m currently working on the reveal/sonar mechanic of Team Kraken’s latest moth game project. The idea is that you are a moth, and your primary means of sensing the environment is by feeling vibrations echoing off of objects around you. The vibrations come from flapping your wings, and if you flap hard enough in a certain direction (by pressing space) it will trigger the sonar. The sonar is a cone of vision stretching out in front of you. Right now […]