End Of The First Production Sprint

The past couple of weeks, our team has been hard at work to finish our first production sprint and all the tasks that came along with that for both the artists and coders. We're excited to show you the progress we've made, so let's get right into it!

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Art 

Models 

The game's big bad has been modeled in all the various parts it will need in order to attack the little frogs! Not only this, but they also got unwrapped (so they are all set for texturing) and have been rigged so the Heron might start its attacks very soon!

Croakie and Ribbie also have been worked on and their jump animation is finally complete!

Texturing

To add a bit of personality to our characters, the frog and the heron's textures have been made! For the frogs, there is a lot of hand painting involved which adds depth to a simple model. Croaky (player 1) gets an orange texture with purple accents and Ribbit (player 2) has opposite colors. The Heron's model needs more refining but the base colors and gradients are ready to be polished by painting more detail.

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Code

Blockouts For Different Screens

We've made blockouts for 3 new screens, the Start Screen, the Victory Screen and the Game Over Screen.

On the start screen players will be able to join and ready up, for now this looks quite boring, but later down the line, our artists will work their magic and give this a nice little 3D scene, where you'll also be able to see which of the frogs you'll be playing as!

We also spent some time on the Game Over Screen, making sure it works functionally (such as button navigation). When we have the art pieces ready later on (such as the UI buttons and backdrop), we should be able to just plug them in and it should just work!

This is what our vision for the final Game Over Screen looks like, two very sad frogs, but willing to try again…. or give up, that's up to you!

Lastly, we've also made the Victory Screen, the art for this is also still temporary and will be changed later on, when coming upon this menu, the 2 frogs will jump in joy and after a brief delay, you'll be sent back to the main menu!

Frog Animations

We implemented the walking and jumping animations for the frogs. We put the animations provided by the artists into the game and wired them up to the player movement. In Unity, animations are controlled using a graph of animation states connected by transitions. In our case, we reused the same animation for multiple states, to have more control which transitions happen in which situation. With the walk animation, we made sure the movement works both with smaller movements and with longer sprints. This is achieved by having a separate state for the first hop and for the next hops. The jump animation is split into three states: jumping and moving upwards, falling and moving downwards and landing. We used transitions to the animation itself to make sure the animations stays at a certain timepoint before it can transition to the next state.

Attack!

We spent some more time working on the attacks as well. Since this was the last week of Production Sprint 1, we had to clear all of our tasks off the board. This means that all our attacks for the heron are done, code wise. In the next sprint we can then make them completely finished.

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Next week marks the start of our second (and last) production sprint, we're thrilled to keep working towards making our little frogs defeat the heron in a fun and engaging way, so stay tuned for that, we'll be back in another week with more progress updates!