So week two of production has come to an end. It’s been a tough week with many delays and unforeseen obstacles, but I still feel we have managed to get far. Our pre-alpha was due for today and while we have not reached all the goals we set ourselves for it, I feel we have reached enough of them for there to be no need for despair. (Yet)
This week I wrote a generalized system that handles the interaction between spells and actors within the game. Me and the other programmers set up a system where any object within the game can either have the tag ”Team Red” or ”Team Blue”, then we made it so that objects would act over the different Layers:
- ”Champions”, ”Soldiers” and ”Structures” : for actors with rigid bodies that collide with each other.
- ”SpellTargetAll”, ”SpellTargetChampions”, ”SpellTargetLiving”, ”SpellTargetStructures” : For spells that are triggered only by the appropriate actor-layer.
This put together means that a champion can create a spell that will only interact with i.e. the enemy teams champions. I created an ”OutcomeCalculator”-script that automates this process, and also applies the correct effect; such as HP-loss, on the actor hit by the spell.
I’ve also worked a great deal with the GUI and animations for the champions this week. For the GUI I used an external Unity-tool called Daikon Forge. Me and Daikon Forge got off to the worst possible start when a weird bug in Unity made it so that I could not select the GUI objects I created in the Unity editor. After hours of obscure Google searches, several reinstalls of both our project, Daikon Forge and the whole of Unity. Finally after having almost given up we found a post describing something similar and of course the solution was incredibly simple, yet impossible to guess at. It was a pre-set Layer in the Daikon forge editor named ”GUI” that failed to connect with the Layer we had defined in Unity named ”GUI”. The layer settings of Daikon Forge simply had to be removed and set again manually.
After this horrible start, though; Daikon Forge turned out to be a really smooth tool to work with. I managed to quickly create polished GUI that linked up with the champions health and abilities and their cooldowns. The character animations was also a joy to work with, It was simple and intuitive to set up the triggers that would connect one animation with another.
Finally the merging we did of our branches of the project has made it so we have a nice little pre-alpha, or maybe pre-pre-alpha (or… you get the idea). We have a champion with a nice animated mesh and GUI that can activate three unique abilities on cooldown (a ranged missile, a strike and a dash). These can be used to fight the soldiers that spawn automatically from barracks in the game world. We also have a network that has not yet been connected with all of the game, but have gotten four champions spawned by different players working together.
This is not quite the alpha we had planned for; lacking the commander overview, the fully working network as well as the fog of war. But it’s definitely not nothing and with the possible exception for the network completion, which it is hard to get accurate time estimates on I feel we are not more than a few days behind our planning.
There is hope yet!
The Game Design Endevour 