I spent a lot of this week (and last week) working on a single new level. That level took waaaaaay longer to finish than I expected, but I'm pretty happy with the result. I also spent some time this week just relaxing and playing some non-PogoChamp games. Throughout the game development process I've found that it's really important for my creativity and drive to take breaks when I feel that I need them. I work on the game part-time and still have a full time job, so balancing work and recreation is important to make sure I don't get burnt out.
New Level
I'll be talking about the new level, and why it was such a pain to make below. If you want to keep the level a surprise until it's added to the game, skip the following section.
I decided that it would be funny if there was a level where you were chased by a bull, and had to "defeat it" by getting it to charge at you and run off stage. My original idea was to make it actually bull shaped, so I built a bull out of simple geometric shapes. Once I finished that I realized that without animating the legs, the bull looked pretty stupid, so I decided to give it wheels. Once a bull has wheels though, you might as well just go all the way and make it a car. Here's the side-by-side comparison of the original bull (right) and the bull-car (left):
Now that I'd decided it would be a car, I had to decide how to move it. I learned that Unity has a "Wheel Collider" specifically designed for cars, so I figured "perfect! I'll use that". It was a big mistake. I ran into tons of issues using the wheel colliders: the car would constantly flip over, it would get stuck in weird situations where it would slowly flip when nothing was happening, controlling it's speed was a nightmare, and it would just randomly jitter while not moving. I spent a bunch of days just trying to deal with some of these issues when I finally gave up on wheel colliders entirely and used a simple rigidbody, and applied forces manually. After I changed I immediately knew it was the right choice, and the movement came together very quickly.
The next confounding factor came with my desire to give the bull car some personality. It's a giant bull shaped car! If it's just driving forward that's a big missed opportunity. I came up with several animations that happen during different phases of the bull's attack pattern, and I think it really gave the bull some character:
While doing this was fun, it meant a lot more work to support replays than just moving the car would have taken. Making sure that the fire effect played, and that the animations didn't overlap or play incorrectly when changing between different focused replays took a chunk of time, but it all "works" now, so I'm happy about that. Overall I think it's a pretty fun design, and I hope you like it when it's eventually released.
Non-Development Stuff
I also did some other things this week, like make a PogoChamp TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@pogochampgame . I don't really know anything about TikTok, but it makes more sense to me than Twitter does, and I think suits PogoChamp better than Twitter. I'll be posting video clips on there occasionally, so give it a follow if that's your sort of thing.
Changelog
- Finally finish work on the new level This is Some Bull.
- Prevent powerups from being triggered after you crash or explode.
- Fix replay errors in new level Jailbreak.
- Added Camera Distance setting to options menu.
- Fixed bug where the camera in replay mode wouldn't update when the camera settings changed.
- Add some extra safety checks around reading saved settings.