Balancing on the edge of Survival
Last week We submitted an entry for edge online's Unity3d competition. We had six weeks and dayjobs in the way so we had to scale our original ideas down quite a bit but I think we did fairly well considering the constraints.
Update: I tried to embed the game in this post recently but do to some wordpress issues there were window sizing issues. you can play the game however here.
#if Fortunes … #endif
No Just Deserts today, been trying to clean up Fortunes so our client can show off what we have so far at RavenCon and at her talk at the library of congress. She wrote up an impressive amount of copy in this ungodly dark magic excel spreadsheet James designed and I've had fun wrangling getting unity to read from that. Apparently even if you get it working in the editor that does not mean the excel file will be moved properly when you go to build so I have to copy it manually after building each time. Future task: automate that process.
I additionally have poked around in conditional compiling since our code for saving a divination doesn't work in a web player which is something we want to be able to do. Just in case you're trying to do the same thing this page http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Platform%20Dependent%20Compilation.html is helpful but not the first thing to come up when I was searching myself.
Food in the desert & asset store
Just deserts has sent us to our first paid purchase at the unity asset store. Its worked pretty well for our free asset store items so I guess its time to give back to the asset store community.
As far as just deserts is concerned got food implemented and along with that player health. Went ahead and put in the logic for losing the game at 0 health even though nothing can damage you yet. Enemies were supposed to be next up but that didn't get done because of frustrations with a free model I had found that was far too detailed and got imported poorly to unity and had orientation issues(I could not get it's forward aligned properly with the mesh.)
Withering away
Those poor plants in the upper right are almost gone
Got the plants working in a "creep" like fashion now. They cover a radius around where you planted and slowly draw in instead of just having a static plant that vanished after a time. It sounds like a minor difference but the visual impact of seeing the foliage withering away was really satisfying.
Next up is working on Enemies. I found a free scorpion model on Turbo Squid and am going forward with that, any of you know of other places one can find free fauna models?
I was really worried that this project was falling apart before this week but several things have come clicking together.
Intricacies of Binding volumes
Been having a lot of trouble with an adjustment we've been trying to make to our Edge game, just deserts. The win condition is supposed to be when you've covered the desert with fauna and I have the plants as a circle of foliage around where you planted them. I was checking for victory by periodically raycasting down onto the board and seeing if I could hit the board but this was coming up true in some very wierd situations. I tried many things including changing unity's collider trigger settings futzing with layers and various head aches for multiple days.
Today I tried changing the colliding volume from a cylinder(what matches the model) to a box. It works now.
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.
Models & Animation – Adding a touch of gloss
Worked on updating the graphical appearance of Just Deserts today. Its surprising what a difference throwing some textures on a few models can make.
Ran into some trouble with trying to animations and Mixamo to work. The player model I'm using gets into a walking pose but won't actually animate walking. I'd like to drill down into it but I've got a day-job I have to get away too.
Before
After
Our foray into the Edge create unity3d competition
Since we are ahead of schedule with programming for fortunes we are entering the Edge Create Challenge
Edge Create Challenge 2012
We came up with a game for their theme of 'edge' that we're tentatively calling Just Deserts. It is about a struggle to preserve an ecosystem on the verge of dying out. We've got a good working prototype with programmer models going on right now.
Beautiful programmer models
Are any of you taking part in the edge competition? Let us know in the comments!
Divination — Fortunes
What does the future hold?
There is a for fun Divination aspect to our game fortunes where at the end of the game you get a future generated by how the game went. Since the game play is mostly solid yesterday was working on making this a little bit more visual.
No, not exactly what I meant...
A problem we ran into is the fact that the layouts are pretty large. We have to make the cards tiny to fit on screen or have you scroll forever. So what I've tentatively done is to just have a picture of the layout with boxes for the cards which you click to reveal the detail of the card for that position.
This is a layout for a fortune...
clicking on one of the boxes gives you...
Ignore the silly text, its a place holder just like the art.
For reference the old, boring wall of text version looked like this:
This is a good fortune we promise
So what do you all think? Is this change an improvement? I may add colors or something to distinguish the separate categories within the layout to make it pop a bit more but visual aspects are not my strongest point. As you can tell by looking at the website! Well if you read this far thanks for reading and please share your thoughts.
Fortunes Screenshot redux
Most of the updates have been to AI for fortunes but there are some visible updates.
Stock art for now until our artist is done
So here we have a bit of how it will look like with card art, although this isn't the art we will use in the end. Also there are toggles in the upper corner for toggling sound effects and music.
Nike!
That was what was yelled after Pheidippides made the run from Marathon to Athens. Nike! Victory!
That was what I felt after a coding marathon with Anthony this past weekend. A lot got done. A whole lot.
...
I had to start this post over. I started pontificating and that is not the right thing to do here.
...
I just want to congratulate and thank Anthony on all of his hard work and express how in awe I am of his drive and talent. I am lucky to know you, buddy, not only as a business partner, but as a friend.
If anyone reading this thing does start their own studio, remember, the asset you need most of is not cash, but motivation and discipline (and a quiet place to work helps to).
Thank you again, Ant.
