Systems Updates:

• Reworked the grapple mechanic to ignore the player colliders so you can grapple in a full 360 around the player now.
• Changed grapple to adjust player "facing direction" to match the direction you are grappling to (turning the player towards the grapple)
• Added rotation to the sprite so that the player model follows its rotation around any object grappled to
• Complete UI overhaul (Pause Menu, Main Menu, Screen Space UI)
• Player Animation first pass
• Full art rework for "Jungle Zone/Ground Floor" assets to better align the art style with later zones
• Minor level design changes to "Ground Floor" area
• Added resolution options based off your monitors refresh rate

User Interface:

• Main Menu
  • "Animated" trees blowing in the wind
  • Leaf animation
  • Complete background overhaul
  • New Font
  • Removed placeholder logo
  • Added Settings to main menu

• Pause Menu

• Options Menu

• Mouse Cursor replaced with "Fly" character

Level Design:

• Forest Zone
  • Some trees replaced with other models
  • Pre pond jump modified to be easier
  • Pond exit jump modified to be more consistent when jumping from the lowest point on the Lilly pad
  • "Wall Jump" sections had overlapping platform colliders replaced with single colliders to avoid hitting small discrepancies in the colliders

Art Assets:

• All the new animation frames
• Ground floor asset cleanup
• 2 New trees

Moving Forward:

• Sky Zone grayboxing
  • Final Sky Zone
• Finish Controls in Options
• Add frames to Idle/Jump/Grapple Animations
• Audio rework
• Player VFX
• Continue Options (player prefs)
• Opening Cutscene
• NPC's
  • 3-5 NPC's with tips and tricks when approaching areas that are a little bit harder to figure out
  • Opportunity for me to inject more flavor and personality
• Comprehensive Beta
• MAYBE

  
  

  • Mobile Controls/Release
  • Stand alone level/challenge mode
  • Leaderboards

Closing Thoughts:

I really wanted to focus on cleaning up and polishing what I have already so that I have a MVP at the very least by January and wont feel rushed to finish the level design of the "Sky Zone". Working on animations and creating the logic to have the player sprites rotate to face the grapple point of the spring joint was really a huge undertaking for me. I haven't done much animation and I do not consider myself a strong programmer so I got some help from a friend with the rotation logic. Since the previous player sprite was a head on single frame I didn't have to worry about moving the grapple launch point, but as soon as I made the frog have a body I needed to move the launch point to follow the new animations mouth. I'm pretty happy with how everything turned out in this last sprint. Below I will include some "design documents" I was using to wrestle with the logic. I was originally trying to mirror sprites and grapple launch point on various axis but it got incredibly complicated and no matter how much I pushed the concept there were ugly edge cases. Instead now the sprites are never mirrored on the Y axis and instead the sprite rotates to always face the grapple point set by the spring joint and the sprites will automatically be mirrored on the X the grapple connects "behind the player". 

Looking forward to finishing up UI and Continue logic next week! I am a bit ahead of schedule which feels nice.