Hey folks, just a quick blog about my schedule for tonight and tomorrow. I’ve got five hours to finish the game, by midnight on Saturday. I was planning to do an hour tonight, and then four on Saturday, but alas I have run into a small snag. This snag being uploading the videos to YouTube. The original codec I was using to record them resulted in around 40 meg files. However, with this new codec, they are averaging 140 meg. As my upload cap is tiny, this takes quite a while to get to YouTube, during which time I really can’t use my internet at all. Which definitely causes a lot of problems with my dev style 🙂
So a change of plans to solve this problem. I will do two hours tonight, and do the remaining three tomorrow, spacing them out as widely as possible. Then Sunday is definitely retrospection day 🙂
Every hour it starts to feel so much more like a game. I think next hour I will add the inventory and points system in. However, I digress, lets look at hour 14 🙂
As mentioned yesterday, I’ve altered the spawning pattern of the ore, so they now appear in bands. I’ve been playing and tweaking with these settings, I think a large part of deciding on the ‘fun’ aspect of the game will be tweaking the amount of ore in game.
After ore tweaking, I made a mega-uber-health-recharge-sphere thingy. Basically just a sphere with a quick gimp texture on it, turned into a trigger and when the mole collides with it, it instantly recharges the laser and the engine. Definitely an important game mechanic 🙂
Then I had to think how best to put this game object into context. I could have a docking bay on the Limar to provide this, but the problem is as I am dealing with 2.5D, I couldn’t pull off anything quickly which would make sense. I could have the Limar over the hole you go down, but that shattered the illusion of being underground – it just didn’t look right. So in the end I created a quick arm, which is attached to the front of the Limar, which drops down into the hole. I think it looks pretty dang cool 🙂 I added a purple light inside the energy field, which causes some pretty cool shading effects on the giant Limar model.
After accidentally creating a camera into the scene, inspiration struck me! Having a far off camera, and by switching to it with a key press gives an AWESOME view of the mining you are doing. I’m not sure if I will keep this in the final version of the game, depends if I can get it to work exactly how I want. Also undecided if I am going for the real view, or the bathed in green view. So many decisions 🙂 Loyal blog visitors, I ask you for feedback on this issue 🙂
Really really excited about the next hour – once I have an inventory system, and a points system, I have almost all my criteria for a game – really didn’t think I would get this far so quickly! It’s awesome! Also, I have to add, getting twitter followers, and getting subscribers to my YouTube channel, is awesome cool and motivating, thanks very much guys. And for those that haven’t, please think about doing it – every extra one is another step to my world domination! or something hehe.
Graphically, I’ve added a black background image, and added a texture to the plane at the back of the play field. I think this helps a lot in giving the impression you are actually in a crater 🙂
Most of the time was actually spent addressing a bug which had been annoying me for a while. When you fire the laser, and hits something, two objects are created, a light and a cube which deforms the terrain. This is all good, but as I am running this in an Update() loop, it meant holding down the mouse for a second sometimes results into hundreds of items being created. D’oh! So after some reading, I discovered I could grab the number of objects of a certain type. So by placing an if around the object creation section, it was very simple to cap the items. The video shows you how to tag an object (which I will be uploading just after this). The code used looks something like this :
var meltingObjects : int = GameObject.FindGameObjectsWithTag("meltingObject").Length;
if ( meltingObjects < 5 )
{
var MeltyCube = Instantiate ( MeltyCube , hit.point, transform.rotation );
var evilgreenglow = Instantiate ( evilgreenglow , hit.point, transform.rotation );
}
Pretty simple and incredibly helpful, now I can blast away at rock for hours without having to worry about a million item sitting there 🙂 Oh, which reminds me, I’ve also been playing around with creating the ore in bands, with some overlap, I forgot to show that in the video, so will just add a quick screenshot now :
It’s a rough model of the system I want, but gives you the idea of how I want the ores spread around the asteroid. In that screenshot they are floating 100 units above the terrain which is why it looks like they are out of the mine 🙂
One last thing, I’ve encoded with the ffdshow codec. Hopefully you get a better frame rate now 🙂 Will start uploading the video now, tune in tomorrow for another hour 🙂
Edit : Youtube vid here : ( hopefully this one works! )
Been a very very busy hour, but thankfully everything fell into place pretty quickly. I’ve added the Limar model into the game now, and made it huge to give a nice sense of scale. Added a plain to the side of the terrain and ‘welded’ ( i.e. matched levels ) them together. Turning the fog on now gives a pretty damn cool looking background.
Also ( and failed to mention this in the video ) I’ve tweaked the texture on the terrain to make it seem much more rock like. It repeats a lot more now, and makes it feel a lot more, well, rocky 🙂 I want to replace it soon with some homebrew textures, as the current one is just a standard unity asset.
Also, been playing around with the Unity GUI functions, found some pretty cool code here, which helped me implement the two status bars you can see. I changed the code a bit however, as my texture wasn’t stretching across the entire bar. Basically, replacing :
Achieved the look I wanted. These two status bars are pretty huge bits of functionality for SpaceOreMiner. The red one shows how much fuel you have left. Once it hits zero, its game over :). The second one shows how much energy you have left for the mining laser. Once its gone, no more mining for you! Of course, the game would be pretty short if they couldn’t be refilled. This is something which will happen tomorrow 🙂 When you head back to the Limar, there will be an energy field or something which when you collide with it, your fuel and energy get re-filled. Pretty sweet eh? Definitely feeling a lot more like a game now!
So that is about it for tonight 🙂 will start uploading the Youtube video now – frame rate still sucks, but as no one is watching these, I’m not going worry to much about it! hehe.
Very, very pleased with this hour. I now have a very cool looking green laser, which illuminates the area around it with green light. Also I’ve modified the FPSWalker script to account for my unique type of gravity ( not down, but to one side ) and improved the mole movement a lot.
The laser itself has four frames of animation, all set with the LineRenderer. Each frame of animation gradually increases the thickness of the beam, after it has reached frame 4, it reverses itself, which when played super fast, gives a really cool looking pulse effect. Pretty happy with that.
The lighting effect of the beam was pretty simple to do – I’m just spawning a light prefab at the end of the laser, which lives for a couple of frames before killing itself.
The other thing that I have played with is the movement, it feels much more natural now. I want to simulate the gravity a bit better, actually accelerating the mole as it falls, but as it stands I’m pretty happy as is. The upward movement is slow, which is intentional, at some point you will have some form of engine blowing fire out the bottom of the mole to make it look like a booster. I think that will look pretty cool 🙂
I just noticed as I was coming to the end of an hour that Unity have released a new version – Unity3. They couldn’t have waited till Saturday, damn them! 🙂 I’m making such progress with this game as is, I shan’t be upgrading yet. Learning as I go in timed challenge is pretty tricky as is … re-learning a new version could seriously impede my progress. So I will wait till after the 19 hours, and maybe reward myself with the indie version of Unity3 if I actually have a game written.
Well that is it for now folks, just going to record the YouTube vid and call it a night 🙂
Edit :

I noticed the mining laser didn’t show in its full glory, so have recorded a high speed version which I am just uploading now.
