Devlog 3 - Major Art Upgrades
May 30, 2019
A busy month at Frolic Labs is bringing some exciting developments. As momentum grows for the development of Dune Sea, we continue to grow our game, our contents, and the community.
Character Art
New NPCs
We added another ground animal NPC to join other desert dwellers. This time it's the Desert Goat, or Ibex. Crafted by Alex , our character artist, it features models of male and female goat with a wide array of motions. These goats are often seen moving in small groups, roaming over rocky cliffs and foraging for food.
Bird Art Update
Another update from our character artist is the refinements of a few specific motions of the goose character model: Takeoff, landing and turn. These were needed to improve the overall feel of the player bird and give it smooth, natural looking motions.
This is perhaps the most visible element in the game, and now that we integrated them into the build we can really feel the difference.
Environment update
A significant effort was put in the recent weeks to revamp and upgrade the look of the different sections in the game. Steve, our environment artist, is creating the meshes that make up the props on the ground and constructing each of the parts in the level.
One major step was to create a color scheme, to determine the pallets and colors that will be used for the earth and sky gradients.
Much more of these sections will be coming on the next few weeks.
New Music Tracks
The soundtrack of Dune Sea is an important aspect of the game, and it is essential for setting the mood of each level and section and create a deeper experience. Our music composer, Jake, is working on additional music tracks to accompany the different sections of the game.
Here's a little musical snippet of what he is been working on recently.
Camera
Finally we got to upgrade our game camera with the help of Unity's Cinemachine. As described in detail in this recent post, we switched entirely to a system of multiple cameras: some fixed, some moving. The Game Camera, the one that follows the player - required most of the work. One side effect of that was a bit of wobbling when following the up/down motion due to camera pitching. The camera angle was locked in the old model, and in order to get the new camera to behave the same we had to do some scripting. We also added additional cameras that are used in special moments to create instant cut scenes. One such moment occurs the end of each level.
With this we conclude the activity for this month. You can keep up to date with all our goings-on on our Discord channel, on Reddit and on Twitter.