New map, new beginnings!

Hi!

We have a nicer update this time. As we had discussed in the past devlog, we had an issue regarding the scale of the assets that was causing a huge problem with the gravity of the objects, the shaders, animations, and even some of the early textures made for the objects.

We had mentioned in the past devlog that we were planning to remake the gameplay scene in Unity in a different scene, and so we did.

For starters, we had to resize the objects in Maya, which is the program we used to make the assets for the game, but here we faced a new issue. The scales in Maya and Unity are quite different, so we committed the same error as before but this time in reverse. We had made the assets too small.

In the end, our assets ended up looking something like this:

1. the original size
2. new size, too small
3. final size

After some trial and error, we finally made everything work decently, but we had to reconstruct the whole map a total of three times before we had the gravity be decent, and the scripts could work correctly again.

And talking about scripts, we also had to adjust them a number of times while we were reconstructing the map, since the scale of the player and enemy does affect the functioning of their mechanics.

New Additions:

So apart from making the whole gameplay scene again, we wanted to add new mechanics that we considered important for the experience of the gameplay.

First of all, we added a new mechanism where the resources (water and food) could appear in any place on the map, at random. This mechanism works so we can determine the max number of resources in each area of the map, and it comes with a cooldown that allows for the resources to not accumulate in an area. These areas are defined by green boxes:

For this, we struggled quite a bit with the movement of the camera and its collisions with the walls. This issue was resolved to the best of our capabilities; we remade it a total of 5 times, and we were not able to completely make it work as we wanted it to.

We made a huge effort to add animations to the enemy and hamster, but the animations are failing us for now. We are actively working on making them from scratch instead of taking them from Mixamo, since this is proving difficult to achieve. We believe the animations are turning out quite nice for now, and we hope to add them after the next playtesting.

We are also now working towards creating the textures for the characters. We hope to have all the texturing of the assets finished after the next playtesting. We want the textures to be as cute and as simple as possible so that they complement the toon shader we plan to add in the final product.

We wanted to add something fun and random to the map, and so we did. We added a little Easter egg in the windows of the apartment, so we took an old project we did for practice where we had a fish with legs dancing in a pool room of the backrooms. This is what the players will see if they take a look outside the window of the apartment. This is just a little fun thing we wanted to do, nothing especially necessary, but a nice addition.

We wanted to add a nice little feature to control the volume in the game since there was only one volume setting. We added this as a feature in almost all of the game screens.

In general, this time we had a lot of work remaking everything, but the results were completely worth it. We were able to put all the accumulated knowledge from these past months into a few days of work, and we believe that the final product this time is much better and refined in comparison to the last updates.

This is all for now; we are planning to conduct a playtest in a few days to see if the new scene works as intended, and after that, we will be making new changes and having a final playtest before releasing the Beta of the game.

Thanks for reading :D !!!