fttm - devlog

I had the idea for this project planned out well in advance. I wanted to keep things simple, so I planned on making a platformer rage game vaguely inspired by Jump King and Getting Over It, where instead of dying, you simply have to get to the top, and missing a jump means you lose a lot of progress.

I thought the basic wasd + space controls seemed a little too boring, so I decided to implement a different control scheme, where you press space to jump towards the mouse. A few years ago, I had implemented a mechanic like that while fiddling with Unity, but I remember struggling with it. So on the first day (November 4), I implemented that jump feature, and it wasn't too difficult. It made me happy, knowing how much I've grown.

I had spoken to Misha about making assets, and she was unsure if she could do them, so I spent November 11 working on a few basic assets. Originally, it was just the titular character, so I could rig and animate it, as well as work out how it would look in game, but I ended up designing and drawing him pretty fast, so I figured I could design the start screen as well. I had already decided on the general aesthetic, that being silly and cartoony like a kids' book.

On November 16th, I got back to work after a few days' worth of break from development. On the first day of development, I was having difficulty getting the camera to follow the player. Parenting it didn't work, as I had to keep the rotation locked, and I was also having some difficulty with the code originally. Coming back to it helped; as I was able to implement the feature easily with a set of fresh eyes. A real challenge I faced was with the frog rotating to jump towards the mouse. I was having difficulty in figuring out how to rotate the rigidbody properly, and once I figured that out, I was having some errors with my math, and it would keep facing the wrong way. I mainly fixed that with trial and error. I also had brought the frog into Live2D and prepped it for rigging this day. Over the next two days, I rigged, animated, and imported the frog model into Unity, hooking it up to the jumping script I made.

On the 19th, I was working on it in class. I pretty easily implemented a way to change the frog's gravity depending on where it was, and also brought my start screen graphic into the game. I also asked for advice and what to add, and was given the idea of adding a height meter, to show how far from the moon the frog was. With that, I also decided a timer might be a useful way to measure success.

The 23rd and 24th were my busiest days. Misha had managed to finish most of the level design and props on the 22nd, so the 23rd was mostly me implementing what she had drawn, and finishing the last bits of art, which included: props for the space area, UI elements such as the height meter, a start cutscene and end cutscene, and the credits. The 24th was spent actually implementing what I had drawn, and polishing it up. This was also when I had implemented the height meter and timer.