That air was too fresh, lets kick it inside a while.
So the last post I made. Wow. That was kind of a mistake I guess. Not really though. Needless to say it will not be existing now, or ever.
Better news. That concept is going to be fleshed out into a real game, instead of a lame demo. There will still be a lame demo, though, of course. I have undertook the task of writing up a game design document for a much fuller Zelda-clone experience set in a nuclear wasteland. The project will still be done on Unity3d, and hopefully eventually hit the app store.
Now, don’t take that as an announcement yet. That’s still secret. Give me a couple months and maybe I’ll have a site up for it and THEN you can consider it announced. Until then I’m going to let you in on a big ol’ secret. My holy bible, the document itself: LINK.
Not complete by far, but it’s to a healthy point where I want to stop and hammer out the fundamental code and gameplay into Unity before progressing further into the details. The story is still stewing in my head. It’s hardly the most important part (that would be the fun dungeons and such) but I still need to have a reason for the player to go from dungeon to dungeon.
So yeah! That’s some uh, big news I guess. Woo! Now, I have a favor to ask all 6 readers of this blog. Make sure I go through with it. I’m already pretty set on it, and I already think I’m an awful waste of flesh for taking this long, but some extra prodding from my peers will definitely be helpful.
Alright then? Alright! Stay warm, star pirates.
A breath of fresh air!
Proud to prematurely announce that I am working on a new project: Dungeon DEMOlisher. Notice the capitalization.
It all started a week ago when a friend told me Demon Souls was on sale at gamestop. Well, it wasn’t. But 3d Dot Game Heroes was! For those who don’t know it’s a 2010 Zelda-Clone for the PS3 which got me thinking, why aren’t there more Zelda-Clones for the PC?
Ta-da. Now, we’re not ripping straight Zelda, and not ripping straight 3DDGH. Just making our own Zelda clone one dungeon at a time. There is as of yet no planned overworld, just a series of dungeons to be done maybe on a monthly basis. If that. Hell, maybe the whole project will get scrapped after just one! The point is this will not be a massive undertaking but one of bite-size proportions. Our first dungeon is representative of a games first dungeon, half tutorial, half puzzle solving. The first dungeon of the first Zelda had 17 rooms, so expect a size somewhere around there.
Stay tuned space rangers!
Road Block
Sorry guys my computer is out of order. Major hardware failure so it isn’t something I can easily fix. I’ll try to get something up and running in the next week or so but no promises, my only other pc is barely capable of running unity games. I will keep you posted!
Chapter 4!
As I begin to type this the clock stands at 11:59 p.m. central time, so I DID make my deadline of sunday!
In this chapter we finally got to get our hands dirty with some scripting, and we finally get to see what is inside of that dubious outpost in the middle of this strange island! Spooky!
Firstly we had to assign the door of the outpost itself a tag, so that we could reference it in the script later. We also imported a few door sounds and gave the door a proper box colider instead of just the one made based on its mesh.
Secondly, we made the player collide with it. The chapter is set up weird in that it has you do this in two different ways. By a simple collision, and by a raycast from the player.
As you can see and probably decipher, this is the simpler of the two. The collision. We just check that the object the player has hit was the door, and then call a function (much lower, out of the shot) that opens the door, plays the sound, and sets up a timer to closer the door.
And this is the much more complicated and much more important raycast method. This draws an imaginary line (‘ray’) from the player and uses that as feeler instead of the players collision box. This allows you to, among other things, trigger the door without having to completely ruin its collision mesh.
So far, probably the most complicated chapter and a lot to take in, but looking at the code for only a minute you would be able to understand what is doing what.
Now that you can open the outpost, why don’t you find out what is behind the door!
Chapter 3
In this chapter I learned:
- Tags, layers, and prefabs in the Inspector
- Parent-Child relationships in objects
- Javascript Basics
- Scripting Player Movement
- public member variable adjustment
- and, using cameras to create a viewpoint
In otherwords, I didn’t do anything that is actually showable. In fact, I didn’t do anything regarding the project at all. The entire chapter was an overview of more interface basics and the building blocks of javascript. Pretty easy stuff, I’ve been over all this junk before.
Every demo on this page uses a camera somewhere, or you wouldn’t be able to see. Any demo on this page where you’re able to move the character or camera uses scripts, so that you’re able to do these things via user input. Every demo on this page has public variables, such as the speed of the Racer in ChickenRacer, that I can tweak at a moments notice in the Inspector, or even while playing the game!
So basically, I’ve got nothing I can show you. I’ve finally set aside chunks of my day that will allow me to do more unity stuff and finally maintain this blog the way I intended. No later than Sunday (4/17) I will have chapter 4 up and running. You’ll probably be a little disappointed since as I recall it’s just using scripts to modify the island demo from earlier in such a way that you are able to open the door of the shed after picking up a few batteries. Or maybe the batteries are chapter 5. Either way, you’ll soon see that open-ended island demo streamlining into an actual game with real gameplay elements!
Chicken Racer
Got bored today, also fired. Hand in hand I guess. Anyway I threw together this little demo I call Chicken Racer.
I got a model pack full of prototype models, only 15 bucks. Worthy investment. It comes with little chocobo type models, but I prefer to call them Chickens because chocobos are copyrighted. Anyway, here’s the demo!
Leave some comments, let me know what you guys think!
Chapter 2: Terrain – Playable Demo
As before I will provide a link to the web player for each chapter. Click the image below to walk around my own personal island!
Pretty good for 10 minutes of work, eh?
Chapter 2: Terrain
Chapter 2 is where things finally get interesting. You get to learn all about terrains with height maps, painting textures onto them, adding in water, ambient sounds, your FPS controller, trees, grass, and random models. Basically the beginnings of any game.
The book asks you to draw yourself an island with a volcano, so I did. I decided to use the novelty star-shaped brush to do my volcano because I’m super rad like that. Have a peak at a very early draft of the island:
You can see the star-shaped mountain, and the beachy area around the island prior to touching up.
Here you can see I’ve touched up the beach area, and get a good look at the heightmap of the island. You can see the volcano, and a random mountain, both textured the way they should be. No grass spilling into the ocean either!
Finally trees, grass is not rendered at this range but you can also get a view of the skybox (which doesn’t have such an awful bottom when you look at it in game) and water. Pardon the island being haphazardly put together, as I have already constructed a better island of my own at an earlier date and I’m only redoing this early chapter to review the skills I’ve already learned.
If you’ve used Unity before this island ought to have taken about 10 minutes to put together. It’s just as easy as drawing what you want, where you want it! A very friendly user interface helps the beginning artist flesh out an island instantly.
Next chapter I get to do some scripting!
Back to Basics
The learning tool I’m going to be using for this blog is none other than THE book on Unity game development. Literally, the only book available for Unity development, Unity Game Development Essentials by Will Goldstone. It’s really a good resource and Will goes in depth into what does what, and why it does what it does.
I’ve already kind of fallen behind on this project, because as usual the second you want to try and do something real life steps in and you can’t get anything done. You should rest assured, here’s the first real entry on this blog!
Chapter 1: Welcome to the 3rd Dimension
Not any game development in this chapter, just a basic rundown on the interface as well as moving around/viewing things in the 3d space. Unity does things a little differently from something like Hammer or UEd and only gives you one viewing pane by default, although you can, of course, enable 2,3, or 4 of them if you would like. For the purposes of this very basic game only one window is really needed and moving around in the editor is as easy as playing a FPS so I won’t need the additional level of control provided by multiple viewing portals.
To the left of the screenshot you can see the game, a vast emptiness (for now) with nothing but a camera object in it. Without the camera you wouldn’t even be able to see the gray so that’s something at least.
In the middle you can see our hierarchy and project assets. These are very important in unity, as it is a highly art driven engine. Your hierarchy shows objects in the game world, your assets shows the assets (models, prefabs, sounds) that you can use. If you edit any of these the changes will immediately show up in any instances of the object in the game world.
On the right you can see the Inspector which acts as your liaison to properties of any object in the gameworld. You can edit model properties, change textures, write scripts, or just change how fast your character runs all through the inspector.
Stay tuned!
Hello World pt 2
Here is the first entry I suppose: HELLO WORLD (IN UNITY!)
A simple terrain, skybox, cube, light, camera, and a GUI text component. Basic stuff, childs play at best. This is step one boys and girls, a month from now compare this most basic demo to what I’ll be putting out!