TOJam12 - Retrospective Day 2

HI EVERYBODY! It's Dan again!

Last week I posted a retrospective on Day 1 of the development of Kill Yourself at the Toronto Gam Jam. While Day 1 was about creating the skeleton of the game Day 2 was all about fleshing out the primary game mechanics. Here's what our todo list looked like.

ANOTHER COMMUTE :/
Another day, another trip down the busiest highway on the continent. Nothing notable here. The weather sucked with the rain approaching its 24th hour of soaking Ontario and parts east. On the bright side, traffic wasn't bad at all and the trip took nearly an hour less than on Day 1.

On the not so bright side I discovered I forgot to turn off my time lapse software and had 13 hours of footage to delete. I subsequently forgot to turn on the software resulting in about an hour and a half of missed footage. Oops.

THE MORNING

I pretty much picked up where I left off on day 1 starting with the most complex elements of the game. The conveyor belt, laser and reflector. The laser is an impassible barrier that will annihilate any corpses that touch it.  The laser uses unity's Physics2D.Raycast to figure out whether it's hitting something and where it should stop. The complicated part is when it hits a reflector. Instead of ending the laser needs to continue in a new direction. Ideally this would use the rule that the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection

However since I was rusty on the math and no level required lasers to be reflected at angles that weren't 90 degrees I put together a hack instead. Not my proudest moment, but it works. I'll revisit this if there's interest in a longer version of Kill Yourself with more diverse levels *cough*commentpleaseifyouwantthis*cough*

The conveyor belt required some modification to the main character's code. Instead of using normal physics the character uses a set of raycasts to detect the floor and walls for reasons which, frankly, I no longer recall. When the player is on a surface it sends the associated object a message indicating so. The conveyor receives the message and applies a force to the character to move it. When the character leaves the surface it sends another message.

THE AFTERNOON

Had my traditional TOJam meal of a sausage egg McMuffin at the nearby McD's. For posterity, this is what our workstation at the jam looked like. We were in the hall directly in front of the elevator on the 5th floor. Tofski is visible in the photo, I'm behind the camera.

All of the core gameplay components are, at this point, done, with one exception. After eating I switch focus to producing environmental art. Since there are a lot of elements that appear in the game there's a lot of art to make. Too much for a floater since they have to produce artwork for multiple teams. Our strategy was to give what needed to look really good to  our floater, Eli, while I would work on environmental elements which are more my forté.

DINNER!

This year we had a lovely meal from Good View Chinese Buffet courtesy of the jam's sponsors.

I may have overindulged on my plate

THE EVENING

Since we received our character art from Eli a while before dinner it's time for me to get cracking on animation. Here's a bunch of delicious time lapse footage for your viewing pleasure. From left to right are the idle animation, suicide animation and walking animation being made.

A big problem came up during the animation process. The initial animation of the character falling over backwards produced a corpse too long horizontally and a little too short vertically. This wasted a bunch of time since I needed to find a new pose for the corpse and revealed a mistake I made in the initial rigging of the character. I forgot to articulate the chest area making it hard to cram it down to a reasonable length. For comparison here's the first version and the final version.

Before leaving I was able to fix up the corpse into a pose that had a decent height at the expense of looking a little ridiculous. Since I was getting a little burned out I decided to head out for the night. I wasn't exactly feeling good and the hour traffic jam on the 401 didn't help either but Day 2 was another very productive time and we did finish everything we planned.