Greetings! here is the post-mortem / dev-report for Turbo Transform.
I will focus mostly on some technical background as i have received some questions
about this, perhaps it will be beneficial to you.
I’m very satisfied how the compo went for me. I really tried to focus and stay close
to the simple concept of the game, it has worked out well for me. This was the first
time i have made the compo deadline in stead of falling back to the Jam.
Before the compo started I had a rough idea that was applicable to some of the ‘upgradable’
and ‘adaptation’ theme’s of the final round. ‘Shapeshifter’ was just perfect and i could start
right away on development.
First thing was to tackle the morphing shapes. I found some examples on the Unity Wiki:
http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=MeshMorpher
But this didn’t really work out as the normal smoothing got all messed up.
I flirted briefly with just animating all the transition and exporting a mesh for every frame.

But this was creating a problem for morphing to a shape while already in morph to another
shape. So I used the morphing technique as explained in the wiki. In my case i cut the shapes
up in 3 meshes: back, front and side, so despite messed up normals, the shapes would have sharp
and smooth corners where applicable. This worked out very well.
The voice is actually the windows narrator, with some vocoder and pitch effects. The Music i trew
together in about two hours or so. One of the beats accidentally moved to the same channel as
the vocal effects and it sounded pretty nice as a break, so i went for it and expended from there.
I used the same cut-off front sides of the shapes for the walls. The trick with getting the graphics
walls nicely lined up is all in transparent texturing and calculating the proper tiling and offsets.
For the levels and camera movement i used a Catmull-Rom spline interpolation technique i had
already researched for another game. Basically I created a virtual spline from a couple of control points
and then create a few thousand objects along that spline. the walls are positioned on the spline and
the movements are lerps between the objects positions and rotation, with a lot of smoothing optimization.

Finally some game-optimization, ordering the shapes in a logical way, adding some in key sounds
for the transitions with the music, testing and fine tuning of the levels. I though the in key transition
sound were a nice touch, although they do not yet have any significance you play some tunes
if you need to replay the earlier levels. Some people have commented about there not being
a checkpoint or a possibility to start at a later level. I’m still debating this somewhat. The first level
could indeed be a tutorial level you do not need to replay, but i do feel having to restart creates a lot
of tension while playing and a greater satisfaction on completing a level. On top of that there are
only 5 levels right now.
result:

Big thank to everybody for playing the game and leaving such wonderful comments,
it really inspires to continue developing the game.
play some Turbo Transform