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Hey ya'll! Been working on some more back-end systems today plus word design and making the environment better in general. I will share a couple things below.
One entrance to a level in the overworld. Added some nice snow! Took a while to climb up here, but it seems like Juda is pretty happy about his progress
I have also been working on a simple post-processing blueprint that will help change the atmosphere of certain parts in a level. See a simple version of that effect below as I change the exposure compensation when entering this cave.
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Because why wouldn't you want to rip off your wings and use them as moon shoes?
For those interested in the technical how-to's:
1. When spring wings is active and the player presses jump, set a boolean variable to true and set max walk speed to 0 (so player can't move while charging up the jump) 2. Call an event which repeats every .1 seconds and increments a float variable to see how long the player is holding down the jump button 3. When the player releases the jump input action, set the boolean to false and launch the character in the positive z-direction by scaling it based on how long the player holds down the jump button. This way, the player will jump higher the longer they hold the button 4. Of course, you don't want the player to jump infinitely high, so after 2 seconds of charge, force the jump event so the player can't charge indefinitely 5. Add a cool launch particle effect which is just a ring material that grows over time and which scales based on how long the player holds the jump button After a lot of thinking and re-thinking, I have finally finished the over-arching level design of the overworld map (the map that will connect to all of the thirteen different levels)!  This map is much smaller than the open world map I had been working on before. With Juda's landboard ability, it would probably take about a minute and a half to two minutes to traverse from one side of the map to the other. This means I will be able to jam-pack the map with lots of cool enemies, creatures, secrets, and beautiful moments without it feeling too open.  Above is a map where the level entrances will be. Notice that the first five levels are fairly compact and after that the world opens up a lot. This is due to the fact that Juda will get his landboard ability after completing level 5, so it will be much easier and faster (and fun) to traverse larger sections of the map after level 5.
Unfortunately nothing super awesome to show from Juda this week; ever since the new approach to the game I have been doing a lot of behind the scenes planning and game designing which doesn't have much to show unfortunately. Stay tuned for more updates!
Please ignore all of the other nonsense that is currently in this level as it is my go to level for testing various player mechanics :). Let us know what you think!
For those interested in how the combat system was created, there is nothing super complex here; the system is composed of only a few things: -A couple transition animations -A couple swing animations -A front flip animation -A ribbon particle effect to make the swing have that cool visual effect -Animation notifications which tell when the swing particle effect should start and stop -A launch character node for the front flip animation -Some trigger box's attached via sockets to indicate if the wings hit an enemy (in this case the enemy being a floating cube) All right you crazy people. I took a brief hiatus from Juda development to recuperate from the difficulties I was having in the programming. I am going to have to greatly shift the direction of the game, but I expect it will be much better and more attainable. Essentially, one of the player mechanics I was using was not working (and I couldn't get it working) on a level with level streaming.
This means that Juda will not be able to be a vast open world game but will rather be contained of discrete levels. I think this is going to help me from a management perspective and will hopefully help with this player mechanic as well. Not to mention it will be easier to optimize and all of that good stuff. Due to the lack of progress I was making in Juda over the past week, I decided to take a short break to refresh my mind before returning to the large project. As such, I challenged myself to make a full game in one day. And guess what??? I failed...
But! By the end of 36 hours, I had a pretty darn good game regardless. Just took a little extra time to sort out some issues :) Anyway, if you would like to play this game for free, simply join our discord and I will make it available there. Discord link: discord.gg/r6PK3Cv I had an unfortunate series of things go wrong as of late; I spent about 20 hours trying to fix a very particular bug that I was having. I even contacted outside support for help and he was equally stumped. Needless to say, this past week was a little frustrating, but onward we go! If I can't figure out this particular issue, I will simply have to go a different direction.
Let us know what you think! Description of how this was achieved below.
This effect was fairly simple to create, but I love having things like this to make the game more immersive and just feel smoother to the player.
Essentially, when the game is first loaded up, I reduce the camera arm length of the character to about -2000 (so the camera arm length is in front of the character at that point) and instantly add the start menu widget. I also ignore move input for the character so that the player can't make the camera do strange things during the transition. From there, once the player selects "New Adventure" I lerp the camera arm length from -2000 to the default camera arm length for my game (which I believe is 800). From there, it is just adding back player movement and voila! If you like this explanation or want to see more of the game, I would be honored for you to join my discord or my twitter. Thanks for reading! Thanks to all of you wonderful people who have supported our last game, You're Not Special. We just passed our stretch goal in terms of sales! I never expected for there to be such a wonderful response for my first published game on Steam. Thank you again, and Stay Reky! Trying to figure out the water system in our game (it is a little unique) but as I figure that out, Juda updates will keep on coming!
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