#4 Presentation and Graphics

#4 Presentation and Graphics

This week's graphics focused on replacing placeholder assets with various fish and shark graphics and implementing various animations with multiple states. To facilitate this, I sourced various asset packs from vendors online, focusing on cartoon-themed graphical styles that pop out and add vibrance to the background and my background marine plantlife.

Asset 1 - Scary Fish Sprite

I sourced this asset from Game Developer Studio with a yellow fish design themed around a piranha-type fish that suited the gameplay loop of eating fish to grow large and eat large prey. (Brooks, 2025) It came with five animation states that I used two of so far, but I may expand. Currently, I'm using the At Rest state for idle with left and right animations rigged to moveX parameter, which translates the directions based on the physics system to swap between left and right. Secondly, it has a swim animation state for right and left. These states are displayed below:

Idle Left and Right 8 FPS Animation

Swim Left and Right 12 FPS Animation

I separated the fps between the two to simulate a calmer idle state compared to moving.

Asset 2 - Animated fish sprite

This asset was sourced from the same website above to maintain the theme in style and graphical consistency. This pack came with two states, idle and swim, with six colours that are shown below:

(Brooks, 2025)

I had some trouble with the spawning in different colours of the fish with animations. Ian from class gave me some directions on how to implement this via making an animation clip for each, then using code in the spawner to control random colour spawning, which I will implement this week. The animations are displayed below:
Idle State 12 FPS

Swim State 12 FPS

(My attempted fix for the spawner seems to have changed colours when previewing this animation clip, will be fixed promptly)

Asset 3 -  Shark spritesheet

This asset pack from the same website has 10 animation states, although currently only using two, planning to attempt to create different animations for the seek and flee behaviours the shark has. (Brooks, 2025)  I'm currently using the swim left and right states to demonstrate, but I will add a chomping animation to facilitate the seek behaviour. These animations are displayed below:

Swim Left 12 FPS

Swim Right FPS

The main problem I encountered during this stage was trying to implement the spawning of Prey Fish with six different colours but only one animation clip. I attempted to use the sprite library to implement this with an array holding the sprites, but I was unable to get it to work as I was having an issue where the fish would cycle through 3 colours instantly on spawn and then go to the same colour every time. Following discussion with Ian, I've decided to use the approach of 6 separate animation clips and then use code to implement them at runtime, given the time limitations in this project.

Feedback:

Feedback this week was good, the graphics implementation was received well, I had good responses on the visual style and comments on feelings of surreal and nostalgic, which is what I was aiming for, and they liked the growing mechanic. Got some more good feedback on the animations but also a potential issue where the prey fish were glitching out after eating multiple in quick succession so the spawner logic could need to be looked at and there may be some issues with shark animation or logic as there was some glitching when it turned quickly due to player movement. Both will be looked into. Regarding previous feedback, I corrected the collider issue by swapping to a tag and layer-based collision system instead of parent and child colliders that were causing serious hitbox issues. The next feature I will be adding to the UI will be adjusting the camera zoom based on player size to keep the level from getting quite small once the player gets large, so I will get that deployed alongside the UI this week.

Goals this Week:

Implement UI elements (Scoring, Shield timer, and Timer)

Link level 1,2,3 with a menu to allow for complete game testing

High score system

Retry and main menu functionality

Camera manipulation

Polish

Reference List:

Brooks, R. (2025). Animated fish sprite [2D game asset]. Game Developer Studio. https://www.gamedeveloperstudio.com/graphics/viewgraphic.php?item=1j4k9e3u912a09031t

Brooks, R. (2025). Scary fish sprite [2D game asset]. Game Developer Studio. https://www.gamedeveloperstudio.com/graphics/viewgraphic.php?page-name=Scary-fish-sprite&item=1t4o133i3n2f817f81

Brooks, R. (2025). Shark sprite sheet [2D game asset]. Game Developer Studio. https://www.gamedeveloperstudio.com/graphics/viewgraphic.php?item=184n1c35396l1z887x