Week 7 DevLog Update #6 - Player animations, Pause menu and Finish Tile

 

Development Log - Update #6

Week Beginning: 9/11/2020
Project Week: 7 Spritesheets and Animations

 "Student Vs Zombies: Academytis"

This week I have focused on the graphics side of the project - mostly the player sprite sheet with new animation states,  first zombie completed, another zombie sprite sheet in progress, items sheet and designed health bar for player UI.

I am reviewing the game name and initial logo design because they don't don't fit  with the demographic or feel of the game. The name is not catchy or unusual and the logo doesn't reflect the zombies and survival aspect of the game. 

Updated art work is as follows:

The Health Bar UI - designed by hand

The green bar is for player health and the water bar is a measure of stamina that can be replenished at water fountains or vending machines. This UI is designed so the water section can sit in the little indented area on the right side of the health meter.The fonts were inspired by user made fonts on the website 1001fonts.com - modern font style with a cartoon element,

Items and Item particles

These items include...face of a generic tutor (for the tutorial), a ruler for attacking in close combat, 3 small text books and a dictionary with a white throw particle of papers flying and the cash card for scooter credits

These are the updated Heal and Damage particles, created specifically for animation of health pick ups and enemy damage. 

These particles may change to white so their colours can be picked within the Unity engine in the next version. The health particle animation still needs a bit of fine tuning to make it flow better and I am pleased the fountain spray of  the damage particle  

Player Spritesheet 

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This spritesheet was updated to include the red electric scooters that you often see at  universities to travel around the local area. The scooter could be used as a sprint function outdoors to evade zombies and could be funded by the cash card item. But this needs a bit more thought around the mechanics. A little bit of vertical motion and hair movement was added to give an indication of speed.

The following spritesheet has an additional blink state animation when the player idles to add a bit more interest and character:

Zombie 1 The Spitter ...Walking Animation

This is the first version of the zombie that will be dragging its leg as it slowly crawls after the player. The updated version that has had a colour and position fix for the arms, but has yet to include two or three frames of its death once their health has been diminished. I am thinking about a prefab animation for each zombie death.

Zombie 2  Scratcher...first draft

Project Steps (and Programming)

The programming of the base game covered the following areas this week and the mechanics these have been added into the game 

• Pause Menu - this will need a designing
• Up and down (multidirectional) Character animation
• Finish Level Tile - this will need a prefab and a possible animation.

I added walk up and walk down animation to the player sprite sheet and character on scooter sprite sheets

Two areas that I want to look into further as the graphics develop are:

• Enemy death animations - using a prefab and death animation for zombie death
• Characters walking behind walls and in front of walls - by manually changing the size of box colliders in wall tiles as this looks really effective 

I had a bit of debugging to do as the Pause menu was attached to wrong options and a button missing connection to resume script

Finish level tile placeholder was completed. Placeholder Pause menu leading to concept Settings page with sliders shown below:

Placeholder Pause menu and options:

1) Goes back to level select 

2) Goes to Settings Concept page roughed out below