Saffron Animation and Dialogue

The main focus of this game project was for me was to try thing I hadn't before. This is why I wanted to make a 2D game and try and play around with the animation editor. But I didn't want the whole process to be completely new, so I decided to make it a point and click, puzzle game, reminiscent of Factory Of the Lost Soul (Second-year project), from the mechanics to the spooky theme. 

More about my work on Factory of the Lost Soul here:

http://dynamitewinterproject.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Jemila

I started by learning how to make a 2D walking script, that also worked with a sprit animation. I had done basic animation before, but never sprite work. This was one of the reasons I decided to make the art style so simplistic so the animations wouldn't be too complicated. It also gave me an opportunity to play around with Unity's animator and animation functions.

The code I made used the input manager to allow the player to move so they could use the keyboard or a controller. I then remembered I originally going to make a point and click game, which meant I would have to rework the movement scripts to work with a mouse and navmesh. But in the end, I decided to keep the controller, as I haven't make a game specifically for that kind of input before. So I saw this as a good opportunity to change my way of thinking when it comes to player interactivity.

I then want on to adding dialogue, as it is one of my favourite parts of the games I play, yet I had never added it sussefully to any of the games I have made. I used the tutorial below for the most part, then changed how the dialogue triggers, form mouse/ button UI input to a controller. 

https://www.youtube.com/watchv=_nRzoTzeyxU&t=0s&index=5&list=LLibLLmq190wPCI1q4nfc4uA

Host and Battler Visual Novel

I wanted to try making a visual novel for a while now, so I used some old characters of mine to test out Renpy. This mini project was more for experimenting with the programs scripting language and getting used to putting together a visual novel.

I enjoyed making the character art and thinking about their personalities, however, I found it quite difficult writing out all the dialogue. I've always enjoyed thinking about stories, characters and plot points, but trying to write that all in a creative or interesting way is tricky. I decided to cut this project shorter then I had planned, simply as I felt the writing was taking up more time than playing around with the program was, which was the original purpose of doing this. 

Kitty KABOOM UI and Menus

To make the shapes for the UI I used the pen tool so that I could get very crisp edges. I then also desied to use the photoshop effects to add demention to the UI assaets, insted of painting them by hand. Doing this allowed me to keep the assaets looking uniform and neet. It also made the prosses faster as once I had a effects set I liked I saved it and simply aplyed it to the others.This proses still took some time as I don't have that much pratice with the prn tool, and getting the effects the ways I wanted them still took a lot of trile and error. To get the bubbly shiny look I wanted I still had to add small bits of highlights and colour by hand. I also used the pen tool to crate the two fonts I used for the title, and I also wanted to crate an entier font for the game using the same two style, but I didn't have the time. I put all the assects onto one sheet as it takes up less space and made it easire to inport then into the game. When making the assets I also sometimes made veriations in the same sheet incase the design I when with didn't work well or I had changed my mind.

As the art style of the game had changed, I desided to redraw the main characters so that it was more clear what their refance should look like. I wanted to do more indepth character sheets, but due to time I desided to leave it as it wasen't really needed. To save time, I desided to used this picture for the main menu of the game, both because I didn't have time to do something else, and as I wouldn't have to to make a cut scean fo the game, I feel like this image will at least introduce the characters to the player.