Well, it's another week and another update for the hard worked on Piggy Payback! Welcome back to this exciting new game. This post covers up to Dec 20. We really hope you enjoy the read and we encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter to be reminded of devblog posts and updates on the game!
So, this week we started out by doing a bunch of things here and there. We added the logic that let's the player see how many eggs they've collected. So, now, whenever we add eggs to a level it automatically updates in the HUD, and when the player collects an egg it does the same. Now players can strive to collect every egg in the level!
We re-added the Cannon with a brand new mesh that looks more like a cannon. It's still a placeholder, but these little updates are really making this game look and feel like a great game. We also added the "death" and lives logic. Plus, we added some more textures and materials to the project as needed. One of these is the spotted egg texture/material that our 2D artist, Andrew made. This material really makes these eggs pop, and the gold material is going to be beautiful!
Next, we replaced the "Boom" fire button for the Cannon with an invisible one because we're trying to keep the UI as minimalistic as we can, while still letting the player see what he/she needs to. In addition to that, we increased the power slider below the Cannon to let the projectile pig shoot out faster.
Another cool update we made was simple. We rotated the pig 90° on the Y Axis to it always faces the camera. Now we can let the Player see the different Pig characters head on so they can see all of its features. Plus, it looks funny as it Bounces around the level, staring at you. 🐷
After this, we also removed the angle slider, since it does this automatically, as well as the placeholder UI/HUD we were using.
The next day I decided to tackle the swinging pig on a rope. This is a target the player can hit, which Swings back and forth, bouncing around on the rope/cable and squashes/collects any bird or egg it touches. Hitting it at the right angle can be a big help to the players score. I had it working well before we rebooted the project, but up until today it was just dropping to the floor upon begin play.
To begin with, I changed the length of the physics constraint and then set the linear limits on the X and Z axes to get it hanging again. Then I enabled soft constraint, which, with physics enabled and a mass of 0.1kg, it was going crazy, bouncing around way too much. It actually bounced off screen and stayed there. To solve this I Increased the stiffness. I found that the sweet spot is about 1.7. I then simply constrained the actual swinging pig on the Y Axis. Now it Swings nicely. And after writing the logic for it, it collects the eggs like it should. The only problem is that it's not springy enough. But there is no problem within the laws of physics that can't be solved, so we will get this.
A new day and a new challenge! Today we begun to set up the points pop-ups for the birds and eggs. We want it so that when a bird or egg is squashed, the correct number pops up, Bounces around and then floats/fades out of existence. So I made an actor class and a widget for this and wrote the logic. In the Blueprint, I ran off beginplay, casted to the original game widget to access the player score variable, casted again, to the point pop up widget, and set it to display the text box inside the widget to the screen. I still haven't got the points to change from the "1000" I typed into the text field. Also, when I add the timeline and set render opacity nodes the points don't appear at all. I'll have to come back to this once I've looked into it some more.
We decided to try finishing the logic for the birds. To get them to play a sound, destroy and have their points update to the HUD. The thing I was missing was the custom event to trigger the called event that calls the logic that handles the points. I didn't have the input on the custom event that's related to the bird type enum connected to the Switch On E_Birds node. So nothing was picking up the enum. It's these little things that can get you. The funny thing is the wire for this is green, and I just happened to choose a green comment box for that logic. So I just plain missed it. I won't make that mistake again!
Well, thats a wrap! It was awesome updating you on this ever-growing game. And we sincerely appreciate the fact that you're sticking wiith us. So thank you from DMG. Please come back next time to learn more about Piggy Payback! We're getting closer and closer to being able to post updates in real time. See you soon!
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