pixeljam

Dino Run 2 Update

Added 2024-01-18 14:54:04 +0000 UTC

Hello all,

Here is what's been going on since we released the SANDBOX ALPHA to all Patrons in November:

- We took some time to clean up the Unity project and various parts of the code. It's always a good idea to clean house after the hustle for a big release, since it can make parts of the project kind of messy.

- We took a much needed Holiday break (or at least, most of us did)

- In January we started on 2 major systems for the game:

1) ANIMATED COLLIDERS

If you ever played Dino Run 1, you could probably tell that the raptor's physics shape was a single circle. It worked well enough for that game, but considering what the raptor can do in Dino Run 2, that simply won't cut the mustard, as the saying goes:

Duck and run

Duck and run up a hill

Pounce!

Tail whap! (WIP)

So we need a system to assign very specific shapes to each animation of the raptor as it runs, ducks, pounces, etc. Does something like this exist in Unity for sprite-based animations? Of course not, so we have to write our own. And we did:

View it in action here: https://youtu.be/HyghZZ17bto

Considering we'll have lots of differently shaped Dinos, doing all sorts of things that Dinos were never meant to do, this is a necessary feature of the game. It look quite a while to complete, but we'll be thanking ourselves for it for years to come.

Also something to make our future lives easier:

2) DEV CONSOLE

Having a command line that you can pull up at runtime and fiddle with the guts of the game is awesome, and now we have that too:

View that in action here: https://youtu.be/2zevm_HVT-g

What can we do with it? For starters we can toggle on and off those fancy animated colliders and visualize them while the raptor is running around. We can teleport the dino around, we can do pretty much anything we want without the need to make a visual interface for it, which is a huge time-saver.

Will players have access to the console eventually? Only if they ask very nicely...