Prismwraith Devlog 4 | Mechanics in Practice

OK. This is where the fun begins.

Starting off, I went on the Unity asset store and got some placeholder assets that fit the mood I was going for. Then I started building an introductory level using Probuilder and placed a bunch of the placeholder assets around. I desaturated all of the textures on the placeholder assets so that it matched the mostly grayscale color pallet I wanted.

After a bit of level building I decided to implement a couple other gameplay mechanics I had in my head. The first was objects that can be painted in and out of existence ala Epic Micky. I called these objects “Buildables”.

A buildable object needs to me materialized before it can be directly interacted with. This is done by painting it with the color that matches the object’s outline. Objects that are “built” can then be stood on. A built object can also be destroyed by shooting it with it’s opposite color, and after a short amount of time the object can then be built again.

Here’s the shader I made for “Buildable” objects:

It’s very similar to the color changing shader.

The next thing I wanted to add was jump pads. This was also pretty easy to implement. I just made a trigger that would apply a large amount of impulse force to the player in a specified direction. I then built and textured a jump pad model, and made an animated shader to show the launch direction.

For some reason, when I tried to rotate the object that points in the launch direction, the “up” vector would always point up in world space, not local. Because of this, the jump pad can only launch the player straight up. I have no idea why this is happening but it’s something I can fix later.

I also made this really cool “swirling black ink” shader.

Now I had three main mechanics implemented and the start of a level made to show them off. After some more polish, more sounds added, and a game logo made, I ended up with the build you see in the video.

There’s so many directions that this project can go. I still want to work on it, refine the movement, add enemies, and build more levels.

But for now, I’m gonna take a break.