Froskr's Ascent

Contribution

This was a student base project where the objective was to design a 3d game in unity with two unique mechanics. I was on a team of 6 with 3 artists, 2 designers, and myself as the coder. The game had to be conceptualized, prototyped, and developed by the end of a 5 week period.

Froskr is a third person 3d platformer game where the player is a frog with the ability to walk on walls and grapple with their tongue.

To begin developing code, a capsule was used as a stand-in for Froskr. I first developed the two unique mechanics of our game which were wall walking and grappling.

After the basic movement inputs were implemented on a rigidbody, I developed the wall walking mechanic first. This was developed by using three raycasts points on the bottom of the capsule (back, middle, front) to determine the normal of the player related to the ground regardless of ground orientation. After I developed the grappling mechanic where the player can use Froskr's tongue to grapple onto grapple points such as branches and swing across. This was done with a combination of lerping and spring. This was a hard hurdle as gravity did not affect the player due to the wall walking and would go flying into space when grappling was done on a slightly vertical plane or spin around wildly while grappling. I designed code that would change the physics of the player based on what state the player was in and would upright the player and recenter the camera when landing awkwardly after grappling.

While the mechanics were not as polished as I would have wanted, I had to implement other programming aspects. I implemented the animations on the Froskr depending on the state he was in. Our game had three levels and a hub for a total of four areas. I coded the portals in the game that would take the player from the hub to the new level and back to the hub. I also coded in the menus and UI icons which showed what items were obtained from the different levels so the player could progress. I also developed a code that takes txt files to run a dialogue scene showing the text in a text box and a picture of the character actively speaking.

I enjoyed the project and I want to go back because this game taught me alot about physics in the Unity engine and I want to learn more by working with physics and maybe try this project again using kinematic bodies.