Nucleotide - Game development diary #3 video

Greetings people of internet, my name is Ivan Mandić but you may call me iVan.
Welcome to the Nucleotide game development diary number 3.

First of all, I wanted to mention that everything shown in this video is in early stages of development, and will be improved or completely changed in the future.

This week I started working on the tongue animation.
As you can see, the tongue flies from the player in the direction he's facing, and drags the item it hits towards the player. It doesn't look really nice right now, but it will improve in the future.

The idea is that the tongue wraps itself around the objects, and then starts draging them towards the player, or the other way around. The wrapping mechanics aren't done yet, but I created some good foundation for them. Most of the things I worked on this week aren't visible right now, but they will be in the weeks to come.

I'm not sure are you able to see, but the tongue is actually a 3D mesh, and that required some work on real time mesh generation, that will also be used for some other things.
Another thing that is not so obvious is that the tongue is moving along a curve, this was necessary, since the tongue will wrap around various irregularly shaped objects.

If you remember changes show in last development diary, I enlarged the items collection area and enabled for all collectable items to fly towards the player once he enters the trigger radius.
I expanded that idea and made it more logical.
Once the player enters the collectable item area the tonge fires by itself and grabs the item dragging it towards the player.
This is also in the early stages of development, and will look much better in the future.

Even though this scene you're looking at, and the one used in the last development diary, are made purely for the purpose of presentation, spending time making them gives me the opportunity to play around with different level designs, and art styles in these early stages of development.