UPDATES FROM THE TEAM
LILIAN
This week, I drew the first map which will be used in the final game. It’s inspired by oriental legends of cranes and other mythical beasts living on cloudy mountains. The level is supposed to make players feel “on edge” because of the small platforms which require them to be cautious of falling off the edge. I separated the background into different layers so that parallax can be implemented later on.
CHUYUE
This week, I finally integrated the character selection scene and game manager that I was working on for many weeks!! This is the first step in visualising how players will navigate through the game. Now when other people try our game, they’ll be able to have a similar UI experience to other fighting games. They’ll feel more used to it and the UI texts make the flow easy to understand. The UI does make testing harder though, as we have to navigate through and choose all the options before trying player controls.
ZHI HANG
With the Cactus' draft animation frames done, it was finally time to import them into Unity and test them out in-game!
Thanks to the base model that was already being used in Unity, it was just a matter of replacing the base sprites with the ones I’ve drawn. It was a good idea to draw out and compile every frame into a single large sprite sheet as the Unity engine has support for multiple sprites. Hence, I could just import the sprite sheet, switch the sprite mode to multiple, slice every frame in the Sprite Editor.
While testing out the animations, I realised that they felt empty and lacking some “force”. Upon showing my results to the team, they offered a very useful suggestion: include some motion effects to highlight the Cactus’ motions. Thus, I took a look at other fighting games to see which implementation I could actually replicate. I settled for the simple arc-like effects from Speed Brawl.
I could replicate the red arc as drawn from Speed Brawl.
I have also forgotten to modify the hitboxes and 2D colliders of the Cactus animation frames (currently they correspond to the base model). That was also when I learnt to always record my changes in the Animation window, else they wouldn’t be saved…
AIK PENG
This week, I started importing the Crane animations into Unity. However, as I drew the crane animations using Photoshop’s video timeline tool, it was difficult to export the frames for Unity. There was no easy way to simply export what I drew, and I had to jump through a few hoops to export each frame as individual images. Unfortunately, the exported images were not properly centred, causing the animations to look off and wonky. For instance, the centre of the idle frame is the body. However, the centre of the jump frame would be between the body and the wings. To solve this centring issue, I will try creating a sprite sheet with the sprites so that the centre will be predefined next week.
I also created a UI mockup for the game using Figma to help the team understand the agreed-upon navigation flow.
ROBIN
To enhance our clouds map, we decided to add crumbling platforms so that it makes the level feel more dynamic. It was harder to implement than I had expected because the animations were preventing the sprite from changing as I intended. I had to use animation events to script the platform too, but the end result worked out so I was satisfied. I also made the platform able to respawn after being destroyed, and the time it takes to respawn can be changed based on playtesting feedback.
YU CHUN
Figure 1
This is the level I used to test the ray cast controller. The red rays shooting out of the character allows it to know the type of platform it's standing on as well as calculating the gradient of the slope. Ray casts controllers often had problems with slopes, the 3 slopes in the level allows us to thoroughly test all the scenarios.
Lately, as more features were added to the character, the current physics controller started to feel slightly laggy and not as agile, it was sometimes glitchy and unrealistic as well. After consulting our project mentor Dominic, we decided to convert our physics controller into a ray cast controller, which I implemented. The main reason for using raycasting is the precision of the character movement. It allows us to use precise kinematics to calculate the player's acceleration and velocity. However, the transition to the ray cast controller was not smooth sailing. Things such as dropping down from the platform, knockback and a few other things require refactoring. This resulted in minor regression and also held back our team while the controller was being reworked. However, with the help of my team’s collective wisdom, we were able to solve these problems and move on with our game. With the ray cast controller, moving across a sloped platform feels much better! There are 3 different slope gradients to test the rays.
GABRIEL
Last week I started composing the game music for the Clouds stage. Based on Lilian’s concept art, I feel that an oriental song is the most suitable for the stage. In order to create the oriental vibe, I am exploring different music ideas using a pentatonic scale.
Since this is a fighting game, it also has to sound action-packed. I’m not used to composing fighting music, but from listening to a lot of examples, I discovered a simple formula:
DRUMS. DRUMS. AND MORE DRUMS.
Apparently, I have to stop trying to compose a melody for the BGM. Instead, I had to think of the rhythm and texture of each instrument, as though they are just for sound effects in the BGM.
Here’s my first attempt at composing the Clouds stage BGM:
Here’s my second attempt:
I’m pretty happy with the second attempt. It’s currently giving me a Chinese Dojo vibe, which is what I was hoping for. If I have more time, I’ll flesh this out into a solid 3-minute tune. Hope to share more crazy music ideas!