Freshly Squeezed Progress Report – More Worker and Inventory Animations

Last week, I reported that I focused on enhancing the workers by animating their arms, which helps make Toy Factory Fixer just a little more enjoyable to play. I wanted to continue making the workers more interesting in the next sprint.

Sprint 33: Worker polish and training levels

Planned and Completed:

• Move toy parts towards inventory

Planned and Uncompleted:

• Make worker eyes follow to nearest toy on belt
• Create floor training levels/tutorial

A big part of what the workers do is separate Bad Toys into parts. I had the toy parts merely fall off the bottom of the screen, but the inventory count on the right would increase. Yet, it was not very clear that there was a connection.

So I fixed it. Toy parts now fly from the worker’s hands to the inventory, making it clearer that the parts are added to the inventory.

I even animated the icons in the inventory so that you knew which ones were getting increased.

And I made the toy parts rotate because everyone loves things flipping through the air.

I decided to try adding particle effects, because why not?

I wanted to create a cartoony cotton fluff to represent the stuffing coming out of the toy parts, but trying to draw them from real references was awkward. I ultimately ended up looking at Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree.

But my cotton fluff looks more like a dust cloud, especially since it fades over time. I’m not entirely pleased with how it looks, and so I think I’ll change it.

Ultimately, I spent all of my time on getting the toys to move to the inventory and getting things to animate that I didn’t get to other worker enhancements such as eye movement. The arms move, but they still look dead inside, and I would like to make them look more emotional.

But more importantly, and perhaps in hindsight what I should have been doing for many months, I need to focus on creating levels.

I’ve been tweaking a few things as I have been play testing, especially once I added the new worker types a few weeks ago, but I need to create a few solid intro levels.

In the meantime, I’ve gotten more play tester feedback, and some of the things I want to do to address that feedback seems critical for a first public release.

It feels simultaneously like I am so close to creating that first publishable version and also so far away because it takes me weeks of part-time effort to do what would probably take me mere days if I was focused on it full-time.

Thanks for reading!

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