Devblog 2: Crushing kids in flip-flops & Plane fighter game
Hello again!
Time to update you on everything we did this week! Some projects were improved, new were started. Nice things everywhere. (If you missed our first Weekly Devblog, catch up now!)
As promised, we released WW this week-end, a small punchy platformer. If you need to unwind, play it here!
FENO (@feno42)
Field Trip (Level Editor)
Hey,
Last week I made some progress on Field Trip. It uses the ragdolls and the level editor you have seen in the past weeks. The concept of the game is pretty sane: build a course where some kids will go through. The less make it, the better. I made some progress: improved the level editor, the camera, added a undo/redo feature (funny huh?), made an animated UI.
Localization Tool
I also made a localization tool. It was really easy to build as well as convenient, directly fetching data from a Google Spreadsheet. It’s dynamic & super easy to use. To be honest, the only reason why there is an animation when you change the language is to make a GIF.
NATHAN (@grange_nathan)
VR Dev Camera
Hi, it’s Nathan aka “Enol”.
This week I continued my work on the VR Dev Camera project. As a reminder, my goal for this project is to make a tool that we can use in any Unity VR project to show things from different angles.
Most of the things I wanted are now in. It’s almost ready to be used. Enough talking, here it is:
You can see I now have hands (Yeah!). But more than that were added many new things:
- We can now easily change what type of view (VR ot Not VR) is recorded in game.
- We can change FOV and reverse the Camera direction.
- We can also move the camera around, we just need to do it in a comfortable way for the viewer (which is really harder than I imagined at first).
All those things give me fresh ideas. I’m thinking about a lerping option when you move the Camera around, another to make the camera always look at the VR player or at a specific Target moved by the VR Player, …
But hey, we will see if it’s a necessity or if i’m just taking too much time on this little project.
I wanted to thanks “Wacki” who made the VR input module used for this project (Unity-VRInputModule). It’s simple, works great, and I will certainly use it again for other projects!
Also, the Skybox is from a free pack on the Unity Asset Store called “Skybox Volume 2 (Nebula)” from the “Hedgehog Team”. Looks great!
See you next week!
BENJAMIN (@Valgoun16)
This week I worked on two things: my audio game, and my Imagine Cup project.
Audio Detection Game
Last week-end some friends of mine played it and gave me feedback about how hard the game was. They couldn’t stay alive more than a minute or so. They weren’t able to enjoy the music that way. I tweaked the acceleration values, and the radius of the balls so they’re easier to catch and the player accelerates slower.
Then, I tried to implement a system that let people use their own music. To achieve that the game needs to be able to load an audio file at runtime. OGG, and WAV are easy, I can just use the WWW class from unity to load them but I want to be able to load MP3. Thanks to Keryann, I found NAudio, an audio API written in C# that can load and play MP3. I managed to make it work with Unity but not in the best possible way. Currently, Unity and NAudio work at the same time but not together : I can load a MP3 file and play it, but it’s completely disconnected from Unity (no AudioSource and the AudioListener doesn’t respond to it). So basically it’s useless for me and I’m looking for a way to make NAudio and Unity work together.
Imagine Cup
I also worked on my Imagine Cup project. It involves a third-person character. To be sure of what we wanted, we played several third-person games, like Ratchet & Clank, Uncharted 4 or Sunset Overdrive. We decided to make our own based on Ratchet & Clank. So my first task was to make a third-person character controller and camera within Unity.
Third-person are clearly the character controller I find the most difficult to make not because they’re hard to code but because they need a very precise design. For now this is what we have: a playable character that can move, jump and a little AI following the character.
KERYANN (@KeryannM)
IJDI
I’ve been working all week with our artists on the sand rendering.It’s our primary goal, since the world is just one sand desert, and we want it to be beautiful.
We are focusing on :
- The sand texture, which noise to use to represent the grains
- The light reflection while watching towards the sun
- How the boat seems to interact with the sand
- All kind of visual effects (sand grains carried by the wind, trails,…)
And actually, we have been able to produce a really cool visual effect, a trail, left behind the player’s boat, while navigating through the dunes.
The trail is created with 3 Unity Particles System, that are invisible on the main camera but are captured by a second camera. This camera renders what it sees into a RenderTexture, that is used by our shader as a normal map to displace the vertices of the terrain.
At the same time, we’ve managed to produce some kind of LOD, based on the camera world position, that modifies the terrain tesselation. The tesselation goes down as the terrain is far from the camera, and is highly tesselated where the camera looks.
Working with Shader Forge, Maxime, one of our artists on the team, has made one shader to render not only the sand texture, but the trail, and the LOD tessellation.
NIELS (@NielsTiercelin)
Hey!
This weak I continued tweaking Labyrinth and Rietveld. Nothing sexy though, so I also prototyped other games!
“RED SEA”
I started working on a “FPS where you can fly many planes while shooting with many guns at other planes also shooting with many guns”. (It’s an action game so plot and concept are pretty much the same at the moment).
Tthe basic flight controls and shooting are working. I still need enemies (and their AI…), an eject/enter plane mechanic, more guns, more feedbacks and animations. The visual style basics are also set, but it needs more coherence between the assets.
Name Constellations
This weekend I quickly started a little project inspired by my childhood. I liked to gaze a stars and imagine new constellations. As I’m sure I was not the only kid fascinated by stars, I decided to recreate this feeling.
Here you can see randomly generated constellations. The naming and saving still needs to be coded. I also must add more procedural generation scenarios (patterns tendencies, number of stars, etc). I only plan to work on this game as a side-project for the time being. Many other games need to be finished before fully focusing on this new one.
See you next week with even more GIFs and reports on our progress! Don’t hesitate to follow us @IronEqual if you want to see more visuals during the week!
