We're back with another fun and insightful Piggy Payback! devblog! We're working all day every day on bringing you this upcoming beta demo, and getting ready for our Kickstarter campaign. It would mean so much to us if you would help us out when we launch our campaign! ❤️🐷
We started working on the save/load system. This will save level scores, PXP (Piggy Experience Points) and Piggy Points scored in levels between menu screens. It will also save the players' progress when they exit the app and return.
We're going to use the same UI heading graphics from the game on our Kickstarter page. Our technical artist, Andrew created these, and we think they're stunning! We really like how this campaign is turning out, both visually and linguistically. We're quite proud of it at this point. But unless we get a big number of supporters and backers, we could easily fail. Great games fail on Kickstarter all the time. But even if we do fail, we will have made huge progress in getting eyes on the game, meeting people, making connections, as well as the fact that we can reuse almost all of the content we made for the campaign in our general marketing campaigns. So it's sort of a win-win. ✅️
Something really cool we're working on is the pet Piggy customization system as well as the feed pig system where you can visit your, throw him treats and watch him devour it! It's going to be a really fun mechanic. We want this part of the game to feel like you have your own little section of a farm to hang out with your pigs, customize them, give them treats. All the joy of pig ownership without the energy-sucking nature of those piggy personalities!🐷
We added a brand new hazard to the game. In addition to barrels of water and bird cages, we're going to have TNT crates for the player to avoid, but also use to their advantage. When you bonce off of them, you get an extra powerful bounce, but they also explode after a few seconds. This will end your pig's turn, but it also squashes any birds or eggs within its blast radius. Piggy Payback! Is getting explosive! The TNT crate also has the letters "TNT" panning across it.💣
One of the main things we're doing in this rework is simplifying everything by having one master and everything else of that type as the child. Such as a master sound cue and music cue. A master Niagara emitter, as well as master blueprints such as a hazard blueprint and a mechanic blueprint. This makes everything much more organized and simple.
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." - Leonardo da Vinci🎨
We've been working on the feather explosion particles as well. We added exposed variable in the Niagara feather system for min and max scale to compensate for different bird sizes. So larger birds will have larger feathers in their feather explosion when you squash them. Next, we have to give the feathers random starting rotations, as well as random rotational movement, and a random scale within a range we set.🪶
We just added the beginning of the dynamic camera system to the project! Instead of just having a static camera that's zoomed way out, we plan to do something much more interesting. When the level first loads, the camera will be zoomed all he way out to show you the entire level. It will then quickly zoom in close up to the cannon to show you which piggy character you have loaded. This will be important once we introduce different characters with different abilities.
The camera then zooms out, but not all the way. It will stay zoomed in about 20% (From the fully zoomed out position which would show you the entire level), and follow the pig around the level. To prevent motion sickness, it will not move every time the pig moves. Instead, it will keep the pig in a small invisible window, and only move when the pig begins to leave that window. This is going to make the game look much better, as you will be able to see your pig and the level pieces much better. It will also look much more polished than just a static camera.🎥
Beauty and experiencing beautiful things is good for the soul and the mind. Surround yourself with beautiful people and things, and you’ll be much happier!🌹
Another thing we're doing on the Kickstarter campaign is instead of just having an image of a character, for example, and putting its description in text below, we're creating a graphic with the image and description in it. We really feel that this will be much more eye-catching and easier to read. The campaign has a ton of information in it, so any time we can make it more enjoyable to read, we're definitely going to do it.
💡"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it." - Steve Jobs
DangerousMindGames.com/Piggy-Payback-1
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Wow sounds like lots of great things coming!