This is part 3 of the Christmas 2022 Jame Gam post mortem, if you haven't already read the first 2 days, I recommend you do before reading on.

The Day

The Morning:

The morning started with finishing off the particle effect when a present is being transformed (note transformation not shown).

I finished off the morning by starting to work on toy progression and transition through each of the workbenches. I had some problems with the circle cast to get the closest toy to each elf but eventually found out it was the distance parameter that was throwing me off, after a quick adjustment the whole transitioning system started to work.

After Lunch:

The start of the afternoon was pretty simple, converting the screws into ears so that the first station now sews on ears. This makes a lot more sense than putting screws in a teddy bear...also a lot easier to show off.

The rest of the afternoon was madness. Pedro (artist) was hammering out first pass art assets for the whole scene and I was trying to get them in / critique them as they came in. At the end of the day, we almost have a first art pass complete of everything in the scene, there are currently only 4 assets that haven't had a first pass done, but tomorrow they will. Pedro did great.

Lastly I spent the afternoon animating the conveyor belt and wheels that drive it.

The End:

In the evening I continued swapping in art assets such as the supply crates, resource bins and the new machine. I then felt like taking it easy a bit after all of the chaos earlier in the day so I started to hammer out a basic menu screen/system. An hour later, I have a fully functioning Main Menu with access to the game, credits, options or to exit. After the menu I decided to turn on a bit of post processing. The scene went from:

To this:

Wow.

Lastly I implemented sound effects for the different work benches, slapping rogue elves as well as dropping off resources. I was amazed (yet again) by Unity's simplicity when it came time to doing this. I thought I was going to have to write my own spatial aware audio sources but Unity's Audio Source component has this right out of the box. I didn't have to code a single sound effect. Every sound effect is triggered as part of an animation dope sheet, or event that was already being fired by the game.

Wrap Up:

Today was amazing for me, I started off the day a little pessimistic that we weren't going to even finish a first pass at the art, as well the game didn't seem fun yet. Thankfully I was completely wrong, Pedro hammered out the first pass of most assets, and I made the game more fun by the ability to slap rogue elves before they steal resources. I didn't expect to get to sound effects today but I had plenty of time to implement a bunch, so that was added gravy.

Tomorrow is another day and it'll be a busy one. There are a few very strange, obvious bugs when the assembly line shuts down. They aren't quite game breaking but on that borderline.

Thanks for reading, come back tomorrow!