So Many Types of Draco!

In today's devlog, we'll talk about the latest progress on draco customization!

What type will you get?

When a DracoDrift trial starts, you take control over a newly hatching draco! Who that draco is will be determined the second that egg cracks open, so be on the lookout! There are now tons of different colored dracos you can get, and they all start with different starting stats too!

One of the core features of DracoDrift is draco customization - your ability to shape what your draco looks like as you play. As you collect powerups throughout the trial, your draco will visually evolve in front of you. More offense stat means bigger horns, and so on!

I think this gives each round a bit of uniqueness, as it's always fun to see what kind of draco will hatch for you in the next round. This inspiration comes heavily from Sonic's chao garden, if you're familiar; I loved getting a starting chao and leveling up its stats and watching it transform before my eyes. There's something very satisfying about creature evolution, so I'm glad to be able to bring it to DracoDrift.

Tech Talk

From a technical perspective, implementing this feature wasn't overly difficult, and was my primary task during development this week. I fortunately already have a large library of dracos that already come with quite a large amount of customization, so a lot of the art side of this process was already taken care of. 

Most of the mechanics side of things had to do with writing a new "PlayerStats" controller and hooking it up to the already existing system for notifying the network when a player receives (or losses) a given stat powerup, and creating the breakpoints for stats (as in, at what number of each stat do you visually "evolve"). This will be an area of constant tweaking I'm sure, until I get the feeling just right.

Up Next

Last up for this devlog update is what's coming up next! Now that the stat visuals are working, I'll be moving on to implementing a few more currently missing environmental features, such as jump pads, and then likely moving on to the Glide player mechanic after that. Stay tuned!