One year ago I started working on a little idea I had and at the same time learn how to code in C#. So I have made everything in this game myself but am gonna have someone else do sounds and music. Before this I worked at Visual Dreams as the sole artist on games such as Herman the Hermit, Linkies Puzzle Rush and Slam Dunk Basketball. So I was used to Unity but not coding.
Anyway to the game, it is a simple puzzle game for mobile devices that is heavily inspired by games such as Cut the Rope, Pudding Monsters etc. The goal is to drag the chameleons (Greg) tongue through all the stars to the popcorn. I’m just gonna post some screens and gifs so you guys get the idea.
The game is about 80%ish done, I yet have to add some animations, more levels and the final sound and music.
I finished up the logo animation and figured I would record a little preview of the game, so here are a video of the logo, menus and the three first levels
Interesting concept David. Thanks for sharing the animation rig setup. That’s some useful information.
How is the tongue setup, rigging wise?
Is the character rig in a stand alone 2D package (spine, spriter) or did you rig a 2D character in a 3D package? Thanks for the additional follow up information.
Animations for the menu look nice.
The tongue is controlled with linecasts to have it colliding against the tacks. It is then rendered with a custom line renderer with two sprites at each end and the start point follows a spline curve that is attatched to the mouth joints on the character.
The character itself is a 2D character created onto 3D planes that is rigged, skinned and animated in Maya and thereafter brought into Mechanim to get the multi-directional blending etc.
Here are some pics showing of the character rig.
From the side showing the different planes and sorting order.
Continued working on some animations that have been missing. Still have some effects and tweaks left but here is a work-in-progress of when Greg gets a little to close to the zappers
Love the x-ray effect. Well done.
Not sure if the darkened skin effect looks good though. Kind of hard to tell with the gif bands.
Maybe have him cough out a puff of smoke afterwards.
Great character style.
The zapper may look kinda like a water spray due to the light green coloring, the sparks which look a little like water spray, and the uniform height the zaps keep. Maybe a little extra peak and valley randomly would increase the electric look, and changing the green to an electric blue shade.
theANIMATOR2b: Thanks for the feedback I’m gonna rework the zapper a bit to get it a bit more random and improve the particles, the color is mostly the gif playing tricks. Also the smoke puff idea was awesome!
Here is a screenshot of how it looks when he is “burnt”. Gonna take a extra look at that texture and see if I can get it a little bit more like soot or something.
Zapped animation looks great.
Funny - his eyes remind me of the baby character on the 90s sit-com Dinosaur. Not Da Momma.
Has a lot of ‘character’ in the character even without the quality animations. Nice.
I have for a long time felt that the tongue was too stiff before the player starts pulling the tongue. I never figured out how to fix it though, but tonight I got a flash and fixed it in 10 minutes
I’ll release it for both but not sure yet if I’ll be able to get it out on both at the same time. Might have time for that during the App Store review, it runs on both right now but I need to implement some other SDKs for Android.
This looks absolutely gorgeous! The creature’ animations are cute and very detailed!
Not sure if this would add much, but have you thought of making the tongue not only straight, but allow it to bend? So if the player jiggles the tongue you could see waves propagate through the tongue. Just a gimmick.
I have been thinking about it but it would require a total redesign of the tongue code. I’m gonna add it to my “Would-be-awesome” list and think about it in the back of my head. I might find a simple work-around and it could look really cool
Working on levels creation right now so not much to post updates about. I however made a little gif showing the creation of Greg from sketch to animated ingame, just for fun
I added a new puzzle element today so I can build a bit more varied puzzles. The gum, it can hold the tongue so players can do other stuff. With this I can build puzzles in several “stages”.
And the first level that will introduce it, gonna add a simple tutorial text but you get the point. The button activates the slider so it can be adjusted, therefor the tongue needs to hold it down with the help of the gum.
