Presentation & Graphics Devlog

Hello and welcome back to my Devlog series for Don't Get Caught By The Cat. We're over half way now!!! This time we'll talk about the presentation and graphics of the game. As much of this topic has already been discussed in previous Devlogs, most notably in the basic level blocking devlog, today will focus mainly on finishing touches. 

To kick this off, I decided to add a garden surrounding the castle. In my original concept, I mentioned that game would take place inside the castle and its gardens, but I ultimately decided not to implement the feature leading to me having some spare garden sprites laying around. Straight away I ran into an issue, my sprites weren't filling the tiles in a grid.

After blankly staring at Unity for about 10 minutes, I came to a ground breaking realization, I had entered the wrong value into the sprites pixel per unit field. With my reinvigorated spirit I created this small but beautiful garden.

And once again it was time to blankly stare at the screen, but this time for another reason, I simply could not be bothered. So to simplify removing the green void surrounding the castle I confined the games camera to the border of the maze.

My next finishing touch was to fix my horrendous blunder of adding a stun mechanic without a stun effect. In my previous Devlog I mentioned using animated birds circling the players head, but if you cannot tell already, my motivation for the game is quickly draining so I settled for an animation I found here https://nyknck.itch.io/40pixeleffectspack that I could get for a 95% discount.

To further polish the armor I added a smoke animation that's also from https://nyknck.itch.io/40pixeleffectspack  for when it crashes into a wall so that it doesn't  just vanishes.

Overall the feedback for the games graphics have been positive with people appreciating how well all of the art fit's together in the games fantasy vibe.

"I love the art. Nothing feels out of place"

For this I have to give credit where credit is due. Sara Hollingsworth, my mum, has done an amazing job bringing my visions to life and keeping them all consistent. 

I only received negative feedback when I told play testers about the original idea of creating a garden to surround the castle. As previously mentioned this idea was scrapped due to my laziness. I thought it would be annoying to make a tilemap fit nicely around the objects already within the game, but now that I've put more thought into the idea, I probably could've used the age old trick of editing the tilemap while the games running and then saving it as a prefab. This might be something I revisit if time permits and my hypothesis is correct.