Abban

Starting some animation

Here it is, giant gif:

Day 6 - (Lunchtime Update) Just finished the camera controller. Added some smoothing and made it move ahead of the player in the x or y direction they're moving in. The trick to that in Unity is instead of just SmoothDamping the camera position to the player you SmoothDamp an offset based on the player's velocity then add it to the player's position. I also generated a collider as the level bounds and use that to clamp the camera's position.

Dev day 4 & 5 Stupid paid work was an obstacle the last couple of days! But now I have working room types! Wall of images coming up: Ok some of them need a little randomisation on their paths! So basically how it works now is each room has multiple doors, depending on the last exit one of the doors will be converted into a spawn. The player can then walk to another door and it'll load the the next room at random. Some room only follow some exits. To smooth the path I wrote a script to generate the tiles, store them with their position in a dictionary and then loop back through to check what tiles are around them and set their sprite. As far as I'm concerned thats all the boring stuff done, now onto making this thing into an actual game.

Thanks Rilen for the link. I actually knew nothing about that game jam, as this is my first ever. It helped me put the amount of work needed and the time frame into a lot of perspective. So. Day 2 I did a little system design and some reading and realised my original plan of a constant path that would be creating and destroying terrain around the player as they walked wasn’t going to be feasible in the time frame. So I decided to break it up. I’m taking my path generating code and making it into rooms. When you walk through an exit a new room will be generated with a segment of path. This means I can easily add different branching and larger areas as needed. No going backwards for now though. Bears never look back! Actually, if I have time towards the end I have an idea for generating groups of rooms for a day/level and keeping them persistent while keeping the generator. Generate the rooms and connections first and assign each one a random seed which is saved for that level. Then assign each room a connection through top/right/bottom/left doors. When a player reaches a door generate the room assigned to it using the seed and it should be the same room they enter each time they come back, right? If I have time, this probably won’t happen… I didn’t do any prototyping at all because it was Sunday and I had Watch Dogs 2 to play. So I followed a load of Marcus’ descent from hacktivist into full blown cyber terrorist. Day 3 Longer day today. I rewrote the path generator to make simple rooms for parts of the path, Horizontal, Vertical, T-Junctions, Elbows and Larger areas. I added a basic top down character controller to move a sprites around and some triggers to load a new scene with a new room type when they enter. I looked into making planes to tile the terrain sprite on rather than Instantiating multiple terrain prefabs, but I think that the room based system will be ok with a few hundred static tiles. Time will tell. Bob is working on the sprites now, he’s been sketching samples of the Bear and we’re working on aesthetic stuff a little more. Beer O’Clock.

So day 1 First thing I did was to generate a path for the bear to travel along. It was pretty straight forward, add a few points stepped on the y-axis and random x-axis. For now I set it up to add a new point on the path when space is pressed. Then I added some code to go through between each point and add terrain tiles, 3 tiles either side of the path and some grass padding. That fills up the path like this: The terrain will be generated off screen as the player walks. I'm thinking of stopping the player from going backwards, once you pass a choice its gone forever. Tomorrow I'll look into branching, I think I'd like to randomly branch on a point and generate 2 paths off it, once the player chooses one only generate terrain on that path from then on. I'll also add some code for the tiles to swap their sprite depending on what tiles are next to them, this will round off the path edges which currently hurt my eyes.

Just wanted to leave a heads up for next weeks episode, Fire Walk with Me is on Netflix in Australia and New Zealand. You can (semi?) legally watch it on there by setting up the trial on https://www.unblock-us.com/

The Watch Dogs releases table has been removed from Wikipedia. Here's the revision that had it: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Watch_Dogs&oldid=608465255

That's a really good idea, it'd be super good to have a node package to do that. @Semiotic if you put your code on Github we can contribute to it.

Has anyone used the Pro Tools? http://www.protoolsforunity3d.com/ I've been thinking about buying them but don't know if they'll actually be a help or not.

We've been using Z-Brush for some character painting. What we've been doing is I make the model and unwrap it in Blender, the painter opens it in Z-Brush and paints then saves the diffuse using the UV layout which can be applied to the model in Unity. Its a longish process but its working so far. For environment models I'm just using potatoshop and some actions.

Unity cookie has a pretty good intro tutorial series. Its pretty light on more complex stuff though, although there is a shader series thats very in depth.

I find I buy a good bit of stuff from Creative Market I'm using some actions and badges from there for texturing and the Kyles brush pack is excellent. All costs money though..

I signed up on http://www.autodesk.com/ and set my account to education and entered my old university. They then let me have a 3 year license for Maya, you can get 3DS Max too for Windows. I much prefer Blender though. If you're on a Mac I would recommend Pixelmator for texturing too.

I have a question about animating things like drawers/presses/doors etc. I made a desk with 4 drawers in Blender and an animation for sliding them out. I exported it as fbx with a single drawer thinking I can duplicate that in Unity. Unity imports the object fine, but it when I drop the object into the scene it seems to come in as a group/folder. The icon in the inspector has a little folder on it and in the Hierarchy theres a desk prefab containing a sub desk and drawer. The imported animation seems to be attached to that rather than the drawer. I added an onMouseUp script to the drawer that calls this parent and runs the animation. This is working fine, click the drawer and it opens but It seems like this is the wrong way to do it because this animation only targets the drawer that was imported. So this means when I duplicate the drawer and click on it the imported drawer opens. Should I be importing things like the drawer and their animation separately then positioning them in Unity or am I missing something stupid?

Thanks for the book recommendations!

First post, hello, I'm Abban. What was the name of the Unity book you were talking about?