Devlog 6: Waddle We Do Next?

The game is waddling along nicely, and we’ve packed this devlog with all kinds of fishy goodness and flappy fun. From explosive new characters to smoother animations and random fish chaos, things are really starting to pop (literally, in the case of our pufferfish).

ART

Animations

This week we changed our Blender to Unity animation workflow to accommodate for Unity's expected bone hierarchy when creating a ragdoll. First we create our animations just like we used to, using Blender's IK's and constraints to animate the penguin. Then we bake these animations down to a rig that has the proper skeleton for a ragdoll in Unity. Using this pipeline, we added a bunch of new animations to our penguin, some of which you can see in the following gif:

Pufferfish

We've made another character: the explosive pufferfish. One mesh contains two states - basic and bloated - which can be switched between using shape keys inside Blender. The upcoming task is to animate the explosion.

Player Selection Menu

The players will be able to choose their penguin before a match, and so the Character Selection Menu is being designed and slowly implemented in Unity. This week was focused around getting familiar with Unity's UI toolkit and creating a sprite texture with the buttons that should be reused for all the menus.

VFX

Penguins now leave a trail of water ripples behind them! Some implementation still needed but the base concept works! And once the you die there will be a blood puddle spreading from the area.

For visual clarity we added some breakoff effects to ensure the player can see when a part is about to disappear.

Time to get bloody! When a penguin gets hit there will be blood splatter all over the map and him (some implementation still needed).

DEVELOPMENT

Pick-up spawning

We implemented a system where items spawn randomly during gameplay. Fish now leap out of the water at random intervals, landing on random positions across the platform.

Player Selection (Development side)

This week, we added a player selection menu where each player can choose their character color. Once all players are marked as ready, we transition smoothly to the main game scene. The chosen colors are passed through correctly, so players keep their customization in-game.

Sliding Mechanic

We also worked on a sliding mechanic for the player movement, adding a bit more fluidity and control during gameplay. It already feels more dynamic, and we're excited to build on it.