July Update (+music)

What? Of course it's still July. Your calendar is just running fast, probably. Yes, definitely. Anyways!

So instead of a code sample, figured it'd been a while since I did a music sample, so EVERYONE gets music this month! This is a chunk of Atlas' Gospel, featuring: Atlas!

Atlas is @EmpyreTTV's boy, and is a cutey patooty. I especially like the bit where Nathan broke it down and just let Atlas solo a bit, heh.

So How Are Things

They're pretty dang good. I spent the month, and it turns out to have been literally the entire month, just tightening physics and mechanics. The idea is to go into Production phase soon, and start cranking out levels, so we need the base locked down. In simpler terms, think of it like locking down jump heights in a platformer. Once you start making levels in earnest, jump heights CAN NOT change, right? It's that, just for skateboarding birds.

Part of that was behavior when skateboarding over uneven surfaces. I actually covered that as a everyone-gets-it code example at the very start of this month, so yeah, if you missed it, go check it out. Anyways, end result, now I can roll over arbitrary surfaces, and really curved faceted stuff like bowls, huzzah! Oh, and I did some phone art / poster art, if you missed that:

After that, I made some masks with birbs on them, we added muffin-wrapper skirts, spent way too much time listening to Tico & The Man, and we got into the fun stuff like pumping ramps. That is, gaining speed by going up and down ramps, and just the general idea that you can only get going so fast by pushing, and then get faster than that by doing other stuff.

Stepping back from that a sec to also highlight the AMAZING fan art we got, from @AlexStrook. Also a piece by @ArtBeeper!

There were of course some... minor bugs... in the overhauling of physics and momentum and suchlike. The end result, though, was the ability to actually trick super high off the big ramps, and get the speed and control you need to do some REALLY fun transfers. It isn't instantaneous, you have to work a bit to get the speed up, but it's a nice sense of progression now. You also naturally roll down slopes down, lose speed (and eventually turn around) rolling uphill, gain and lose speed when grinding depending on slope, slopes you can push up VS steepness that you can't quite overcome, all that cool stuff. Oh, and handling what happens when you attempt to ollie in a ramp was just... a whole thing.

After that, I took a swing at balancing. The UI was garbo, and the logic driving the stalls was just... not good. So I redid the UI with a fancier radial balancing bar. I also took a swing at making what happens when you fall out of a bail more interesting, except that bird fought me and it proved really hard to actually make bird fall over. Bird is TOO POWERFUL. Finally figured it out though. The answer was YET MORE MATH.

Oh and Sara (partner who quit her job to come work on birb) also figured out skinned meshes and I worked on improving our jiggly clothes (just get Dynamic Bone for Unity seriously), so now birb can have an antenna, and some really fancy bunny ears.

We wrapped up the month by trying to finalize the Houdini ramp tool, and it works pretty great now. Building these by hand was a nightmare, but now I can make ramps, bowls, hips, spines, fun boxes, tons of stuff, almost instantly. The latest version even adds the drinking straw coping for grinding and stalling!

So yeah! Was a fun month. Looking forward to moving into level design, after I finish a bit more work on that ramp tool. We're to PRODUCTION PHASE baby, heck yeah!