Night of the Piñata Week 8

Greetings once again! Yes, the name of our project game has been changed from “Day of the Piñata” as the original concept called it to “Night of the Piñata”. The reason was that the only level we are going to be able to finish for the game will be at night. It is logic like that!

This week, aside from putting together sprite sheets and text documents, I have been working on a confetti effect for our game. We decided, that confetti will be used to indicate special events and effects in our game. For example, when the score meter reach the point when a power up will spawn confetti will pop around it. As well as when the piñata shrink or grow. Even when the piñata shoot candy there will be a small confetti burst by its head. It will simply be there to give feed-back to the player.

I worked on the most general confetti burst, using flash once again. As I did before I animate high-resolute photoshop images in flash. For this I used motion tween which make is ridiculously fast to animate. But that do not mean its easy. My first try looked like this:

I was not happy with the result at all. I wanted a burst of confetti. It turned out to be something more of a tornado of confetti. The pieces swish around as if they were thrown by several different wind directions. The reason for this was that I curved every line they followed, and didn’t have a solid plan for their movement what so ever. So I decided to start again. This is how it turned.

It will be moving slightly faster in the game. This time I focused on the confetti pieces, thinking about where they should end up if they all start somewhat at the same point and then was forced away from each other all at once. They ought to move in a straight line from the same point, creating a circle around the center. This made the confetti much less messy, but I am afraid it got too uneasy and too coordinated. I am thinking about redo this effect, one more time. But as it seem now with our schedule I will leave it as it is for now. It is not of the highest priority as this time. That is why I will leave it at this stage.

Beta here we come!