Bloom Game development

Play the game here at: https://caffeinatedcrow.itch.io/bloom

I partook in the 2023 Cozy spring Jam.

The theme was "You are the World" - I immediately thought of a platformer where you can grow platforms yourself to reach other areas.

I got started on creating charcater sketches and came up with a little forest fairy:

I then began modelling her in Blender. I have alot of experience when it comes to modelling but two things stunted my progress in this. I Initially set aside 45 minutes for modelling ther fairy but the dress petal and flower on her head resulted in the modelling taking 2 hours total.

I had used the array modifier before to make copies of the object (in this case the petals on the head) but had no idea how to rotate them around a point so with a painful amount of trial and error I finally got the 3 petals positioned where I wanted.

The next issue was the dress, I had been working on a mirrored model, so whatever I do on one hald will be replicated on the other side - which reduces modelling time by half. I kept selecting one side of the faces to make petals without doign the the backside - so I had to go back and undo then redo only to make the same mistake. Eventually I finished and she was done.

Next was to rig her which was relitivaly simple - and then add animations. I decided to add shape keys to animate her eyes blinking and closing when she uses her growing power. Unfortunately her facial animations did not sync with her movement animations so she is always wide eyed for all of them!

I decided to see if I can add animations later on once the mechanics are out of the way since this was taking quite some time.

It was time to replace the temporary cylinder with the model and then retarget and add animations.

Technical issues:

• Model doesnt turn to face left and right for other players (on my laptop she does...strange)

• Glitchy platfrom spawning - fairy can get stuck

• Jumping sometimes clips through platforms