domingo, 13 de marzo de 2016

Progress of Breaking Fast: Boosters, Animations and Collectables

Hi buddies!

How are you doing? We continue working hard and happy on Breaking Fast. Our goal is to have a playable level for the next week. In this post, I summarize the most important advances that have been accomplished since the last post:

- New boosters: we are always thinking of new ways for players to mess up with their adversaries. We have a very interesting new booster in this direction, but we don't want to spoil it yet. More information very soon!

- Collectables: when we first conceived Breaking Fast, collectables (i.e. items that players can collect during the race) were not considered. However, after thinking more about it and prototyping a bit, we have changed our minds: collectables can add more depth to the gameplay. These collectables now fill the players' enery bars, with which they can run faster for a period of time. Although we don't have the final art for the collectables, we have their tracking behaviour, as you can watch in the following video:


- Animations integration: we added animations for the toasters, the beaters and the player. The following videos show the first two:


 

 

- Refactoring of code for player management: this is not something observable, but it took quite a while and has helped me better understand how to modify the behaviour of players. Before the refactoring, the code for player management was a bit tangled and therefore, adding any new feature to their movements or perform any modification to their behaviours were tasks that really gave me the creeps. To put it simple, the refactoring consists of identifying different and exclusive states (e.g. jumping and rolling) and perform the updates of each state in different functions. That way, I don't need lots of variables to manage the mutable state, but I can make do with a single instance variable that holds the current state.

- Leap against obstacles: the player can now jump against obstacles to reach new places. This is something that would have been very tedious to add and prone to error, hadn't been for the aforementioned refactoring.

More videos with the new features and effects will be available soon on our Youtube channel and the rest of the social networks  You can find more information to keep in contact on our web page, where you can also subscribe to receive the latest news on the advances of Breaking Fast.

FM