[RELEASED] The Octopus Affair

[coughlinjon]

Stautus update: Last weekend Caleb and I hooked together all our work. We now have an octopus inside the aquarium. Separately, I added a time slow and zoom to the left trigger, and a pulsed dash to the swim: 

 

Next I added grabbing and throwing: 

 

After that I added a spear object and started throwing it, and I added grab/throw to both a left and right arm - our octopus can hold two objects at once. HOWEVER... you'll have to take my word for it because I didn't capture any gifs, and once I dropped the octopus into Caleb's aquarium, I realized that those features of mine were so underdeveloped and lacking art that they wouldn't add to the experience (which we have to wrap up tonight, June 29, before showcase weekend).

 

-We did all that last weekend, and I didn't find any personal time to attack this project again until today, so the following is two hours of work this morning lol-

Here is the octopus in the aquarium and my first attempt at adding rigidbody motion to it (before I'd just been manually adjusting the transform). I want RB physics only because I want collisions - I am still pretty strict with the actual physics of the octopus controller.

 

I forgot to mention that I added passive camouflaging to the octopus. In the gif above, you can see that my immediate RB implementation is terrible - the creature is rotating out of control, and during the pulse swimming you can see the RB and manual transform adjustments fighting each other every frame (notice the jittering - that's unintentional lol). 

 

So! I did a movement polish pass and got something smoother, and then I added a smarter camo system that will only camouflage the octopus when it is near static environment art (1m distance or so) and moving below a speed threshold (meant to represent slow movement). Here is a gif of those two features: 

 

You can still see that the rotation is nasty - there's nothing scripting octopus orientation except those pulse dashes, where the whole transform orients in the direction of the camera. So I added a tiny bit to OnCollisionStay that will rotate a walking octopus normal to the surface with which it is colliding, and you get movement that is far more pleasant to watch
 

 

What you don't see in all this is that the octopus is constantly alerting fish of its presence when it's not camouflaged, and the fish are becoming scared and fleeing. You don't see it because I think our "flee" logic is a bit broken right now, but I think it'll be a simple fix to make those fish dart away from a scary predator. 

 

The last bit I absolutely want to add to the project (before tonight) is subduing/eating fish. We already have the movement and camouflaging/stealth that we need to fill out most of the hunting experience, so I am hoping that eating fish will tie it together.

[coughlinjon]

Finally released this game  I was having trouble getting it to build (my first time in Unity 2018 was not a smooth time :()

 

https://coughlinjon.itch.io/the-octopus-affair

[brendonsmall]

This is a fun octopus swimming around thing. I do wish there was an "invert camera Y" option, though. Even though there's no real gameplay systems in place yet, it feels fun to just boop around the aquarium with the fishes. Something oddly satisfying about going through the cave tunnels

[coughlinjon]

4 hours ago, brendonsmall said:

This is a fun octopus swimming around thing. I do wish there was an "invert camera Y" option, though. Even though there's no real gameplay systems in place yet, it feels fun to just boop around the aquarium with the fishes. Something oddly satisfying about going through the cave tunnels

 

There is an Invert option: if you hit Esc or Start/Options, it pulls up controls, and you can use the arrow keys to change sensitivity and inversion on the camera.

 

Thanks for playing

[brendonsmall]

Oh man, thanks for the tip! Sorry I missed that!