Devlog 5 & Changelog!

I decided to take the weekend off from posting updates, and instead took the time to continue working on the game while giving myself a bit of a breather. Sorry!

Onto the changes!

I really didn't like how the red targeting circle looked at all, and was planning on using decals to replace it. Around the same time, i was playing with lighting and shadows and I think that the shadows of the falling knives are a better choice to tell the player that a knife is incoming. Knives now spin while they're falling, which draws the player's attention to the shadows. Eventually, I want to have the shadow increase in size from nothing as its falling instead of just appearing. Lastly, the shadows are a bit difficult to see over the score text so I need to find a way to fix that. 

I also played around with the knife spawning! Now, the distance required between knives is based on the size of the fruit. So it should be more difficult to get trapped as a watermelon. If spawning fails, the game tries again next frame. Each time a spawn fails, the requirements become more lenient, meaning knives are able to spawn closer together if the board is getting full. 

There's now a restart menu that doesn't just reload the scene! This should make restarting more seamless. For all of the menus, I need to set up navigation via keyboard. Unity basically does this automatically, but if game loses focus or sometimes when a menu is activated, no button is selected and you can't use arrow keys/wasd to navigate. 

I added screenshake for when a knife falls, fruit falls, fruit hits knife, fruit hits powerup. As simple as it is, I think that screenshake makes it more fun to play! I'm really happy with how it turned out, especially for when a fruit hits a knife or a powerup. In these instances, the shake is based off of the fruit's velocity. So if you're going left full speed into a knife, you'll get a crunchy horizontal screenshake.

I played with the balance of the fruits, and what's probably the most noticeable is the grapes are much faster. Also, grapeS, now plural! To make up for this fruit's speed which makes it difficult to control, there's now 7 of them! They all move together making them almost like a bigger fruit with multiple lives. When there's only a few grapes left, it's easier to get into tight spaces. 

New fruit: Cherries! Similar to the grapes, there's a pair of cherries at once. Compared to the grapes, cherries are slightly bigger but also easier to control.

I'm currently researching into why, when there's multiple light-casting objects on the board, the board only receives light from up to 4 of them. I'm going to look into implementing URP to make the game a bit prettier, while hoping that it fixes this issue. I might take a few days off to prepare for/participate in a game jam. In the meantime, I'd appreciate feedback on this build!