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New Super Lucky's Tale is out on Xbox, PS4 and Steam, and Epic Store! Here's a few of the technical challenges and how our amazing team solved them. #gamedev #indiedev @PlayfulLucky
We had two crowd scenes that would be impossible with a normal work flow on Nintendo Switch. We took advantage of a unity plugin called MeshAnimator by @jakerooskii. He was nice enough to send us a bug fix too. It ported to all consoles no problem.
Light Probes were a poor solution to our character lighting. After lighting was baked it made the characters flat and dark. But real time lights are expensive on consoles. So we added lights in the character shader, and could change the shader light parameters per level.
We needed to update our cinematic workflow because we had a lot of characters to introduce. We created tools to export each referenced character and camera separately, and then we used Unity's Timeline to stitch it back together.
We wanted Lucky to control as a best in class platformer. We did a 1 month long master study of Mario Odyssey and Rayman Legends. Movement, camera, fx, and world interactions. We even remade Tostarena 1 to 1 for better comparisons. Here's a frame by frame arc of Mario's Jump.
One result of the study was that I started animating at 60 FPS to be able to get the animation fidelity I needed out of such quick and responsive motions.
Another result of the study was that we started measuring jump heights and distances in levels with more intention.
To make Lucky more responsive to the world I started adding in a lot of detail animations. Like running up or down a hill changes his posture, and running and turning causes his tail to curl.
We wanted the mobs to have more life. We started by adding blinking, then we would turn their heads to face the player. But we had to take it further, so we ended up giving them a random look around as well. Now they are always look happy and curious. :D
Finally we had to choose quality over quantity. So many fun things like this radish guy had to be cut from the game in order to get done on time and at the level we strived for. Or maybe we just saved them for later...
Have fun playing #NewSuperLuckysTale!
