Hey everyone,
It's only been a few days since our last update, but they've been very productive ones indeed! We've all been working on different things: from level design changes and improvements (to my despair, as the game designer!) to spritesheet creation and asset optimization (which took Joana to Unity, the only non-Adobe Creative Cloud software she has opened in a while!).
Our game artist's new best friend
Also, our game developer, Carolina, is beginning to implement our UI prototype on top of our Alpha Build so that it can be tested with our target audience. Needless to say, she started with the most important part — the game's main screen and its basic features. This screen is still very raw: we're still doing concept art studies, we have yet to implement the game's logo and start icon, and we're still not sure of the exact positions these elements will be in, or their size. Despite all this, we're very happy with this feature, and, after some polishing, it will greatly favour Loowa.
As shown, we wanted a smooth "barely there" transition from the Start Menu to the game itself, and we tried to achieve that with a slow, fluid, and effortless camera movement. Next steps will be experimenting with the camera's position and size, but we believe it looks very promising!
On a completely different note, we were all on a mission for the last couple of days, which we've managed to complete successfully! When we prepared the assets for the Alpha Build, we realised that our foreground layer couldn't be used as it was, because the blur made the gaps between the sprites very noticeable, defeating its whole purpose. We ended up using assets without blur on the Alpha Build, but we needed to figure out a way to make them work in Unity for our next builds.
First attempt
Last attempt
We tried to change the blur settings on Illustrator, but it was very time consuming and nothing seemed to work right. So we decided to explore other options: when in doubt, just "google" it. And that's exactly what we did. We scoured the Internet and, lo and behold, we found a very hand tutorial of how to create the blur effect directly on Unity. Of course, we immediately had to test it. And it worked, as you can watch below!
As you can see, things are moving along, but since we're all working on separate bits and pieces, we're very eager to see how all these different parts fit together. Hopefully, someday soon, we'll have something with a beginning, middle and end, where all the pieces connect perfectly with each other and tell Loowa's story. But until that day arrives, we'll keep working hard to be able to achieve it.
More news to come. Stay tuned!
#gamedevelopment #indiedevelopment #indiegame #indie #gameart #unityengine
