I got the art for the first prototype from Clay recently, and so I reached out to my music guy, Georgie, to get some sound to back the demo up. Georgie mentioned he’d like to get a demo video to help during composition, so I put something together last night.

I’m tempted to call this the Soul Patch, but that’s probably not a good idea, given Georgie borrowed a banjo recently.

I’m prototyping with this level because it requires most of the elements I expect to need for every level in the full game, without requiring many single-use graphics or effects.

So far it’s been interesting. This level marks my first exposure to the Animation system in Unity, and it’s been interesting. I found myself struggling at first to understand how to put things together, because I really wanted to administrate state changes centrally, but once you’ve given up on that notion, things become fairly simple – import a sprite, create a GameObject, drag a set of animation frames over the object, and the Animation editor takes it from there.

I’m using a couple of control variables to manage transitions to new states, and I think I’ll probably end up allowing the Animation to drive the rest of my gameplay.

I’m not sure that’s the most efficient solution here, but it’s certainly the most straightforward, and to be honest, Beat Farmer isn’t likely to be a technically demanding game. My primary concern is keeping it relatively manageable in terms of development effort.

It’s nice, though. My little beets are growing up so fast!