Alpaca Air Attack Post-mortem

So the LD40 is over,

here is my post-mortem as tech artist / gameplay programmer of Alpaca Air Attack. We've used UE4 so some info in the text is kinda using UE4-slang.

I will go over some of things which come to my mind to show off some wip / how stuff was made.

Wool projectile

After I got the basic flying ready, I spend the rest of the first day on wool and weapon feel and other feel/effects in the game.

This is the very first version of the projectile.

After that I added the impact effect, which is just a 3-step texture blended by time and ~6 particles

Squash and stretch

The wool projectiles are squashed and stretched along their path. As well as on impact here is the final effect.

Just noticed the splash has no color from player.

Sound

First of that was my first real experience with the UE4 sound cues for more complex stuff. I really enjoyed it, but didn't spend enough time with it yet and am really anticipating the new audio engine. But I assume that if you are well-experienced with sound design (which I'm not - I did some audio synthesis for fun sometime and tinkered with LMMS and audio generation) you can really do awesome things :)

The weapon sounds were actually recorded made by me - they are cheap "plop" sounds. Which first got noise-removal applied and then mixed together using a single Sound Cue and some graph-magic.

Motor

The motor sounds are not recorded by me, but the graph for it has a ramp up (at spawn) and then loop forever (until destroyed) with some mixed in "blubbers" for variance.

Total of three sound assets used.

Music

After Vivien recorded the basic music and exported it as single instruments - I could just dynamically rearranged and enable/disable the instruments which allowed for wide variation using little assets.

Airplane Animations

The airplane was simply rigged in blender after it was done. Then we animated it using bone manipulation in UE4 of that parts, which made it super easy to tweak those values as you can preview them on-the-fly.

Scarf Physics

First we experimented with UE4's physics assets for dangling scarf and animated by speed but that didn't worked out so well, will test out why it didn't worked properly. Somehow all child-bones collapsed to one point :( during appliance Here is the test from PhAT itself in UE4. Which worked fine, but somehow was not applicable inside the animation blueprint.

Julia then just animated the scarf by hand and I layered that animation on-top of the idle animation

Multiplayer (Local)

Multiplayer was planned from the beginning. The original idea was to make a lobby-like system but due to weird behaviours we just fixed it to always 4 players. In retrospect we should've just made a simply menu (at start) which allowed for selection of players. But the total app-flow was just made in 30min pre-submission, and some things are still missing (win screen).

Local multiplayer is a huge drawback for JAM games especially for those testing at home, you need other people to play with - so make sure to implement an alternative mode (AI or alternative total mode) for single player. We did not had time for it.

Controls

So far the control feedback was always positive, people like the feel of it. I am glad that it worked out that way, during tests we noticed it was quite sensitive at the beginning and with the addition of wool clinging to your airplane it was getting pretty hard. We aimed from the start for a more arcadey control scheme. At first we also had a slow-speed sink, so you would fall if you are slow. That was discarded along the way as we just made the minimum speed faster which kinda made it feel more awesome.

Bounds

At first we all had different kind of ideas of the level, I thought of a more open-spaced arena where you just have some pillars. Julia did a good job with the small amount of enviroment assets she made to create a visual impressing level. Yet we had the problem limit where you could go. Simple solution a timed bound, which triggers once you've left and removes that effect on re-enter.

Things I still would like do add/change

Air Trails

If the airplane does harsh curves I could add trails of air. To visually enhance the feel.

Better Explosion

The current airplane explosion is crap :D I would love to make a new one. Maybe I will do that the upcoming days just for fun.

Also I would like to rework some of the other explosions lots of things learned during the jam.

Thanks

Could write even more but I'm tired now :o

Thanks for reading :) hope that was a good insight in our development. Also thanks to Julia and Daniel for joining as a team :D

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