FMP - week 13 - 14 - Day loop wrap-up

We're nearing the half way point of this module, which means it was also time to wrap-up the day loop. To do so I worked on the following:

• Adding anticipation arm animations

• Polishing arm animations

• Improving tree prefab for performance

• Created UI icons

• Added in some sound

• Made sure NPCs face the player upon interaction

• Adjusted scaling in the day time environment

• Made choppable tree logs instead of choppable trees

• Placed the interactables in the day time environment

Let's dive into the main things!

Animations

Since Rob finished the game logic for the three resource gathering minigames, I could start tying the art into it. Seeing the animations trigger upon user interaction allowed me to spot what worked and what didn't work. And well, some of the animations just were very off in terms of speed and framing, so I decided to polish them up. Especially the woodchopping animation felt very wobbly. I tweaked it a bunch until I was happy. I noted that once I started moving the whole rig back and forth as well, the animation started to come more alive. In hind sight this makes sense, as our entire upper body moves back and forth when chopping wood, and not just the arms. I was so focussed on the arms in the first animations that I forgot about the larger body movements around it.

Once the animations were more to our liking we noticed that the animations came in quite late. We only had animations that triggered after a user had set the aim and the power bar, so two clicks. This made the clicks for the aim and power bar not feel very interactive. To combar this I added two anticipation animations. When the user starts the interaction with a resource, the hands go up in a ready position, meaning that you'll start seeing the hands in frame. After clicking the aim bar, the hands change their grip on the axe, looking as if it's ready for a swing. This transitioned than to the full chop or mine animation. The transition to the animation felt a lot more natural with the anticipation animations added in.

Tree prefab improvements

I worked on improving the tree prefab for performance, as we started to notice performance issues. I had used the sapling tree gen Blender add-on for making the tree. But upon better inspection of the generated model, it had generated so many unneccessary vertices. I started cleaning them up and I also started filling any holes in the mesh.

Although I managed to bring down the vertex count considerably, and I improved the LODs, it still wasn't performant enough. So I ended up switching out the trees in the environment to tree prefabs from the Unity Book of The Dead demo. These trees didn't work for the tree chopping minigame though, so I had a discussion with Rob on what to do about that. We decided to make it a bit simpler for ourselves and just make fallen treetrunks/logs instead of a full tree for a user to chop. This would be a lot easier to fracture upon chopping and would take less time to amke. It is a trade-off, as trees would be a lot nicer for the immersion of the player. But considering there is so much left to do and we don't want to make it unneccesarily difficult for ourselves, we switched to the log model.

UI icons

Since Rob worked on getting the UI in we realised we of course also need icons for the UI! We couldn't find any royalty free ones that we were happy with so we decided to have me make some custom ones instead. The last time I made 2D digital art was about 10 years ago though so this was definitely a gamble. I wanted to at least try it and see if I could create icons that would meet our standards.

I watched some YouTube tutorials on game icon creation before diving in, I especially found the CG color gradient one very helpful. It showed the use of some techniques that I wouldn't have come up with on my own, like selecting certain parts of the sketch and shading that in instead of going in with a brush directly to keep nice sharp edges. Or ways to change the blend mode of the layer to create different effects.

I started with a wood icon, and it's safe to say it was a learning curve!! The first version I did was absolutely horrid, but I'm happy I didn't give up and just tried again with a new approach. The second version was so much better and Rob was also happy with the quality.

Since Rob and I were both content with the quality of the wood icon, I continued with making the other necessary icons. An overview can be seen below. I definitely noticed with every next icon it became easier and faster! I really enjoyed making the icons as it allowed me to learn a new skill.