Game 3 design process (Part 2)

This is a bit of a catch up post as it's been a little while since my last entry.

So from the last point I had a map laid out in Unity and some basic texturing done.

After that I turned over the files to Mitch who added a navmesh to the plane and some simple code for AI interaction, pickups, and a countdown timer.

While that was being done I worked on some of the models required. We needed some toys for pickup items, a monster, and a bed for the end point. Tahlia created an awesome monster for us, so I did some toys.

I started off making a ball shape and UV mapping it with a child-like pattern to look sort of like a patchwork soft ball. That didn't end up looking very good:

So I scrapped that one and just used the beach ball we made for one of our 3D class assessments (minus the landscape, of course):

After that I made some blocks. The blocks were super easy, just a box with a texture applied. The game's very purple in hue so I coloured them quite brightly in contrast. I bump mapped the boxes in 3DS Max, and used Crazy Bump to create normal maps for them to use in Unity:

Once those were done I spent some time on the floor texture to make it fit in with the scene. It was also normal mapped and added in. I normal mapped the stone wall texture as well but for some reason it didn't seem to show up in the scene.

I created a custom skybox and added that in. I made the skybox colour blend with the fog colour to create a seamless effect.

I also started doing the UI at this point. I found a couple of suitably childlike fonts to use and created a custom button template in Photoshop (which was just a crayon style brush in a rough box shape), then put everything together.

I also got the only piece of code I actually worked on up and running (with lots of help from Mark) - a typewriter style text effect for the intermediary screen between the start page and play page:

Then I played around with some audio for the game. I found a nice music box style looping background track for the play scene and some ambient spooky wind noises at Freesound.org, played around with them a bit, and added them in:

Once those assets were done we imported them into the game and started trying to make things work. The UI worked fine. We got the scripts working from one set of game files to the other, with a few variations for the new UI system. We discovered issues importing the monster into the game as the orientation wasn't correct for Unity so required a lot of mucking about to get it fixed. Eventually it worked though and we got a spooky monster happening:

Then we started fiddling with things to make them look and work the way we wanted them to. Little things were added, like some scary monster noises to the monsters. Originally I wanted the monster noise to only play when the monster sighted the player, however that didn't seem to work. We ended up just setting the sound to constantly loop but with a very small audio radius, so you can only hear it when you get close to the monster. It worked out fairly well as you can hear them around a corner but are not quite sure where they are.

We had to play with the time allocated to navigate the maze as well as it's fairly easy to get lost in there. There are no directional markers at all, at first we thought we might add some in if time permitted, but the maze is really quite small and doesn't really need it.

We discovered a fair few issues with the monster AI and the navmesh which we think we have mostly fixed. There's one funny glitch which occurs when the monster catches up to the first person controller - it's scripted to destroy on contact however it doesn't if the first person controller is not moving. It just swings back and forth over the controller until the controller moves, at which point the monster is destroyed. Since the natural reaction on seeing the monster is to move, though, we're hoping that it won't be too obvious.

Tahlia also did a nice piece of artwork which we're using on a few of the screens.

I also added some additional effects to the game - halos for glowy monster eyes, and more halos on the pickup toys, to make them stand out:

The end result is a fairly spooky game:

So we had a quick presentation of the game on Friday. We had some small title size issues but overall it worked quite well, no errors and everything was in it's place. We have some small fix ups and additions to make (random spawn for pickups and monsters, all final artwork, the last few models required, and adding audio tracks to all pages; but otherwise, it's almost 100% complete.