Our original Keyshot: To inspire the look we should head in.

The final look of the game

So how did we get there? What went right and what went wrong? Well, first we needed to actually program a working prototype. This involved giving they player the ability to move, direct the camera and grab things:

it was very important to us that the movement feel very fun and that the crab claws behaved in a silly way. This did make the crab a bit difficult to control, which i feel hurt the game in the end, but overall I'm happy with how it turned out :)

Meanwhile, as I programmed, JoltJab was hard at work creating the crab model, rigging it and animating it.

After building the prototype, I began work on the environment.

The lighting was a difficult challenge, because the Unity shadows simply were not behaving in the way I'd hoped. The result was either and extremely dark scene or very janky shadows.

As a solution, I implemented a directional light as the sun with faint shadows and another directional light facing directly up to illuminate the ceiling in purple tones. I set it to not interact with the crab, however.

Additionally, I created a shader that made all the objects in the scene emit their own light, so there were no pure-black shadows.

After getting the crab model in and making progress with the environment, we had to squish some bugs where you could climb at super speeds and get out of the hole in the ceiling very quickly, as well as some issues where the crab would turn into a ceiling fan. ;P

Afterwards, everything was working pretty well. I got Jolt's music in, Elysia's seashells and many other fun objects to liven up the tidepool.

However, there was...

One final issue:

How do you climb on things that you can also drag?

My solution was that large objects could only be dragged by certain points. However, this led to a lot of confusion when the jam ended and it was released. I had to put up a warning for the Jam version:

As well as a post-jam version in which it was fixed as well as some crucial camera fixes.

Overall, I'm happy with Tidepool. It has its flaws but I think it went very well for someting produced in a weekend. ^_^ If you're interested in trying it out, please head over here:

>CLICK HERE TO PLAY<