DevLog4: Presentation and Graphics

For the presentation and graphics, first I decided to introduce a title screen with drawn elements such as mobile characters, platforms and tokens, and particle effects. These elements together give a visual preview of  some of the action elements to be expected during the gameplay. secondly, I used numerous  consecutive frames of animation for most of the player and enemy behaviours, that include: idle position, movement in vertical and horizontal positions, jumping, casting a projectile, getting hurt or dying. For this work I used the software Paint.net from the company dotPDN LLC and a digital drawing pad to create the elements in layers.  To ease the rotation  process of each element I duplicated the files and edited each new frame based on the desired degree of the extension of limbs or body in order to make the movement as fluid as possible and limiting the number of frames as much as possible. Once I had the desired frames for each behaviour, I dragged them to the scene and adjusted the SpriteRenderer components in order to adjust the correct pixel areas of each sprite and using a point filter to avoid blurriness on the edges and textures of the sprite. This process was repeated for every single visual element added to the project including the tile maps, for which I created scriptable tiles with 2-3 frames of animation to add an extra layer of life to the scene and making it more interesting.  Examples of tiles that I used are the x-axis flipping grass to simulate movement, the up and down movement of flower tiles and dry vegetation. I included free background elements from the asset store, such as  a pixel art trees package that were modified and incorporated  into the project to add more forest elements that match with the environment of the first level of the game.

References:

Stevika (2023, May 8). Free 2D Pixel Trees Kit. Unity Asset Store. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/textures-materials/nature/free-2d-pixel...