I uploaded the environment to the drive waiting for Chris to insert it in the drive. When he did it there were problems as always. Looks like the terrains was so heavy that it was messing with the framerate of the build. I tried different solution but nothing worked. Then Tyler appeared telling me that the problem was the bushes because we had a lot and each one was a different model. He was right but this left us with an old issue again: how to differentiate each player's starting areas.
We found a painting tool which allows us to change the shader. It wasn't the most elegant solution ever but at least worked.
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I rearranged all the assets to the corners with the idea of clearing the battlefield. Tyler showed me how to manipulate terrains: things like editing the proportions, add hills, change the textures and colors. There was also the option of add trees, which I used to add bushes actually. The idea was to outline each player starting zones with them. That makes the terrain a little heavy but I believe it should work. It looks clear, nice, the navigation mesh worked perfectly and the number of the assets seems appropriate. So I definitely want to go with this version.
Because we somehow failed with the desert scenario I was open to considered other scenario themes. Nuhi uploads to the drive a package called "sci-fi platform" which had some basic assets to build a futuristic scenario. Eric played a little with this but he quickly realized that there weren't enough assets to build something big enough, It was pretty basic. At the beginning, I liked this idea because it matches perfectly with our futuristic units. But the lack of assets was a serious limitation. I ended up asking Noha which one he prefers and he said the desert one was closer to his vision. It will be the desert settlement then.
The first idea I had was to use the assets to make some kind of "arena" similar to a sports stadium. So each player will start on their own side of the field. I rearranged the assets to make a division in the center of the scenario. It didn't look pretty but technically fulfill the objective. I also leave a few palms trees around to make it looks real.
It wasn't long before we realized this design had several problems: when I tried to bake the navigation plane every single palm tree turned into an "obstacle" on the battlefield. Same goes for the bunch of assets I had in the center of the scenario. They would block the way when one or more units tried to go through. So we had to rethink the whole scenario since the beginning. I joined the environment team with Tyler and Eric just to do something different as I usually prefer work on characters. We went through all the free environment we could find in Unity Store. Among them, I especially liked a desert settlement one which seems like moderns days battlefield. Also because of the level of details and numbers prefabs so we have more assets to play with. It included a sandstorm which seems amazing but I ended up cutting out because it blocked a clear view of the units. We definitely need to continue messing around with this to have something presentable.
Noah wanted a unified format so each feature team can design the different units following the same requirements. So I helped him to define those ones. We had to consider every aspect of it on the battlefield. Why exactly is made for? How is different from other units? Which is its specific role in the battle? How much should it cost? We tried to force the people to balance the numbers ahead. Finally, the list finishes with complementary information such as a reference image or how many animations the unit will need.
With Eric and Tyler testing the terrains we found last class and finding a way to overlap a matrix on the top of those ones to have a squared level in which the players can easily move their pieces. I wanted to know how exactly the Hololens would seek, recognize and implement a level starting from a flat surface. The first thing I thought was if we can match the color of the surface with one of our terrains, like is the player are looking at white surface a snowy landscape will appear. But Seth told me that would be unnecessary hard to make and what would happen with multicolor surfaces? So I ended discarding that idea and just leave it to a random selection. To set up the size of the battlefield Seth also told me we can give "stickers" to the players, so they can pin up a rectangle to display the battlefield. That what I did.
I was taking a look at the info that Seth sent to us. As I didn't really know how behavior design works I decided to start from the beginning: reading the documentation to have a better idea what exactly is this and how exactly works. So I was jumping from the index to the titles that catch my attention to have a better understanding of this as a whole. The basic idea is pretty simple: create complex AI from a bunch of task units. Similar to flowcharts, there are different types of task as actions, compositions, decorator and conditional. Seems appealing to me to be honest because I like flowcharts. I think they are pretty easy to read because its visual display, so hopefully I will be working on this later on.
This time I wanted to do something different. That's why I enrolled with environment team, to take a look how that works. Usually, I prefer to work on any kind of characters but this time I just wanted to change. So, the first thing I came out with was to do a little research, as always, to define a picture in our heads about how exactly the battlefield should look. with Eric's help, we fill out a list where we put all the assets we found that may match we our game art style. It's surprisingly hard to find relative simple landscapes with basic elements to play with or at least some kind of variations. In the end, we found a fair number but they all still need to be tested...
As we suppose to continue (in a way at least) with our last semester Hololens project, I came back to our old design notes to see if there was something that we could still use. When I asked Noah he told me that he wasn't sure yet, so I sent him the main documents to see if he wants to reuse some of ours originals ideas. As it is basically the same game, I would expect that we can stat a little ahead this time, taking advantage of the work we already did. Sadly he ended telling me that he prefers to start at the beginning.
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AuthorI want to study Video Games in a theoretical way. Archivos
May 2018
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