Bunnies, Bunnies Everywhere
Decided to start a work in progress thread. Be warned, first page is gonna be .gif heavy.
Working on an indie game. It's 3rd person exploration / hunting game that takes place inside a sphere world. So you are able to look up and see the other side of the world and run around the entire thing.
It's currently playable on PC, Android and Vita thanks to Unity's wonderful build options. Here is the currently state of the player movement.
The current state of the AI's object avoidance. I do have working flocking AI but I haven't quite got around to linking the flocking and object avoidance AI together. So you either get creatures that flock and avoid the player, or creatures that only avoid objects.
And...The reason for the dumb thread title of "Bunnies, Bunnies Everywhere" is because of this old bug in the flocking AI. All I had for awhile was bunnies running around, for both the player and the AI. The game is now official referred to by the code name of "Bunnies" by anyone I've showed it to.
This is the first intro level that I prototyped / boxed out last weekend. Hoping to make some progress this weekend and get the 2nd level somewhat playable.
And for a disclaimer since Polycount is art focused. The 2 animated creatures presented above were not created by me. I'm not particularly a great animator and its time better spent on code or other art. As such the Deer, and Canine/Wolf were purchased from the Unity Asset store.
Everything else is coded and created by myself. Final art style still not settled on yet, but its gonna be similar to the current rocks/stones above. Vertex colors with specular maps and glowy/sparkly creatures.
Hope you enjoy and feel free to provide input and criticism. I'll be trying to keep this thread updated in the future.
Working on an indie game. It's 3rd person exploration / hunting game that takes place inside a sphere world. So you are able to look up and see the other side of the world and run around the entire thing.
It's currently playable on PC, Android and Vita thanks to Unity's wonderful build options. Here is the currently state of the player movement.
The current state of the AI's object avoidance. I do have working flocking AI but I haven't quite got around to linking the flocking and object avoidance AI together. So you either get creatures that flock and avoid the player, or creatures that only avoid objects.
And...The reason for the dumb thread title of "Bunnies, Bunnies Everywhere" is because of this old bug in the flocking AI. All I had for awhile was bunnies running around, for both the player and the AI. The game is now official referred to by the code name of "Bunnies" by anyone I've showed it to.
This is the first intro level that I prototyped / boxed out last weekend. Hoping to make some progress this weekend and get the 2nd level somewhat playable.
And for a disclaimer since Polycount is art focused. The 2 animated creatures presented above were not created by me. I'm not particularly a great animator and its time better spent on code or other art. As such the Deer, and Canine/Wolf were purchased from the Unity Asset store.
Everything else is coded and created by myself. Final art style still not settled on yet, but its gonna be similar to the current rocks/stones above. Vertex colors with specular maps and glowy/sparkly creatures.
Hope you enjoy and feel free to provide input and criticism. I'll be trying to keep this thread updated in the future.
Replies
Wow, I love the sense of speed and the camera lean.
Keep up the awesome work!
two things:
1. vertical to what? its a sphere world. Seems like this could be emergent out of that.
2. Maybe its just me, but I don't get motion sickness from a slight tilt. Its a cool feature, its kinda like edging in a motorcycle.
Interesting. I think part of the problem is it seems far more obvious in the .gif than when you play. Doing the figure eights probably doesn't help. The camera is tied to the player rotation at the moment. The player leans when turning, thus the camera follows the leans a bit too.
The alternative is to have the camera synced to the "True Sphere" of the world. This is doable but I already have problems with the jumping ability being synced to this. When you jump, it jumps opposite the gravity, which is towards the center of the world. This can look extremely odd when the player jumps in a direction that is not perpendicular to the object they are on. I'm hoping preventing the player from going on overly steep terrain will prevent this.
There is no inverse IK for quadrupeds (at least last I checked). So if the character is standing on a hill they will be perpendicular to it so their feet don't float. Currently the camera will be the same angle as the player. If you lock the camera to the "True Sphere" of the world your character could be standing 45 degrees to the camera.
I haven't had anyone complain about it yet while playing but I'll definitely keep an eye on this. Hoping to get a playable build with unity web player on dev blog in the coming months so I can get some more people hands on with it. Having people participate in longer play sessions might be worth it to see if it becomes an issue after a lengthier times.
Thanks for the feedback.
Early stages of the boxed out level design, bunch of box colliders everywhere for the moment.
So after getting bored fixing bugs and running through it a million times I decided to mess with the water shader to try and pretty it up a bit.
Gonna move on to the part after the jump success to get an initial concept going. Need to figure out a process for dynamic seasonal change. Then maybe go back to the above with fresh eyes before I spend too much time making things look nice. Also, trying to take nice screenshots of top down level layouts is hard.
Sorry, my description was probably a bit misleading. I used the built in Unity Pro water asset and just messed with the variables until I got something close to the style I wanted. Unfortunately it doesn't compile the same on mobile so I won't be able to use it as the final solution. As such I'll have to either dig into the shader code my self and try and figure it out (Not gonna be fun) or I'll be using something like strumpy's shader editor to make my own. As such I don't have any resources for making shaders, as I don't know much about them myself.
Its a basic Unity trail renderer with some alpha blending. I just attached a few to a object that I spin behind the player when he runs, as of right now it keeps spinning even when stopped and looks a bit silly. I'll have to change that in the future but was planning on messing with the particle system first to see what other options I could come up with.
And a test gif, did this awhile ago just in Photoshop to see if a pure "fade" between each would be passable. Would be cool to have the leaves "grow" but considering I'm not sure how big a roll seasonal changes will make yet I'm a hold off on anything too sophisticated.