Game 1 design process (catch up post - Part 4)

Okay so now I had some basic movement, some design elements, and that sort of thing. I started looking at the things my game would need physically - in other words, the object assets.

Being a fairly simple game it doesn't actually have too much in the way of assets. Unfortunately, all of them ended up being high priority because of that.

Game Object Asset List V1
High priority	Mid priority	Low priority
Bubble (hero)
Boundary bushes
Thorn bush
Log
Stomping dino foot
Biting dino head
Water puddle
Home tar pit
Textures (terrain, bushes, bubble, backgrounds)

Time to go back to the map and gameplay mechanics, and see if I could figure out a way to simplify it down.

If I cut down the game map drastically so that terrain sliding wasn't required, it would also cut out the need to make enemies for the bubble to avoid. That would make things much easier. Removing the motive decay for baking and just having it timed would make it simpler still. I also probably don't need to have an object for my home point, maybe just a textured area would work. Maybe.

Game Object Asset List V2
High priority	Mid priority	Low priority
Bubble (hero)	Home tar pit	Stomping dino foot
Boundary bushes		Biting dino head
Thorn bush		Water puddle
Log
Textures (terrain, bushes, bubble, tar pit, backgrounds)

That's looking much more manageable. 

After that I started working on making the objects, textures, and stuff; a fairly simple exercise using Photoshop and 3DS Max.

My hero is a sphere, with a texture applied. Easy as. I started playing with Max materials to texture him, specifically the "splat" option on Mark's advice. It worked pretty well, but unfortunately the material wouldn't import to Unity, for some weird reason. So I went with a texture I made in Photoshop.

My thorn bush is a deformed geosphere with a Photoshop texture applied. It imported into Unity perfectly and worked exactly how I wanted it to:

My boundary bushes I had some issues with initially as I couldn't get them to look the way I wanted them to look in Max. I wanted them to be blobby sort of forms which could just kinda sit together to make a row, but not actually slot into each other, so they're technically not modular. I played around in Max for a bit and ended up going with capsules that were deformed into various shapes and sizes, and applied a texture to them which I made in Photoshop. I ended up making three different sized and shaped bushes for variety. The texture is the same base, only with the colour values changed and the layers rotated a bit. Because the capsules were deformed, the textures didn't apply so well in Max. They ended up a bit better in Unity, though.

My log was the most complicated asset to make. It's essentially a cylinder, tapered out at the ends, and has had noise applied to deform it. A little branch was extruded off one side. It was modelled from this base image:

  

After that the fun part started with texturing it using UV mapping. I found a suitable bark texture, and log ring image, and played with both until they fit the style of what I'd already made. After a lot of swearing at it and help from Mark, I ended up with a suitable log:

It's not 100% perfect, but I think it looks pretty good.

After that I played around in Photoshop some more and made a background image, a ground texture, and a tar pit texture. That's pretty much everything I need.