Bonus features 🙂 The hour flew past even faster than the previous ones have. Added a rocket booster to the bottom of the Mole, which only fires when you are moving up. Looks quite sweet – I simply changed some of the variables in the standard ‘Small Fire’ Particles prefab. Looks pretty damn cool, loving leaving huge trails of fire everywhere 😀
I also improved the inventory. When you press and hold Q you get a view inside your Mole and can actually see what ore is in the inventory. It basically identical code to the zoom out view, just with different lights and camera. I think it looks pretty cool 🙂
Had a quick scout around for music and sound effects, but couldn’t find anything I liked – so I will be leaving sounds till after the final 19.
I started with this little picture for this first hour :
Flow of SpaceOreMiner
As you can see, there are some awesome hand-drawn renders of the menu layout, showing what I wanted from each screen. In unity, I created three extra scenes, one for each screen, and started hacking away at it. Surprisingly, the coding time took next to zero – loading a scene is a single command, creating a menu item is also just a one line command. Now with these menu items, and a game over screen, I pretty much have a complete game! This build contains all my features from my must have list to qualify as a game. Its a pretty damn cool feeling. And now I have 2 extra hours to fine tune/tweak/add minor features.
Everything went better than expected
Now looking at my imaginary list of things to do, there are a few things I really want to add in the next two hours :
Music/sound – if I can find any quickly that I can legally use of course 🙂
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 pleased with how things have gone so far. I now have pretty much all the major game play components – deformable terrian, player movement, ore spawns and the laser. The most annoying thing to be completely honest during these hours had nothing to do with the game itself, the biggest problem was the bottleneck YouTube presented.
Aside from that niggle, everything went pretty smoothly. Definitely getting better at moving the scene camera around inside Unity. It was pretty frustating at first, but its very much something that you just need to get the hang of. As for scripting, I’ve been producing both c# and js code, mixing and matching them purely to see how it all works, and it all works pretty damn well. It’s a very different approach to development to what I am used to but it really seems to work pretty well.
Very happy with where I am in the development process. Just over half way through my assigned time limit, and I have everything I want. Now its just a case of turning what I have into an actual game.
For the rest of the week ( i.e. Monday to Friday ) my time is pretty limited, so I am planning to just do an hour a night of coding. YouTube/blog posts will come after this hour of time. Then on Saturday do a four hour session, and hopefully have a game at the end of it 🙂
Some things that I need to address in the next few hours :
1.Laser beam. Need to make it look like a huge freakin’ rock blasting mining laser from hell.
2.Movement. Currently when I’m moving the mole around, I am very aware I’m just moving forward/backward/left and right. I need to change that, and change how gravity works so the movement falls into the way I want it to be moved.
3.Inventory. Currently ores are just destroyed on collision with the mole. This needs to change so that the mole actually stores up to 10 different ores.
4.Actual game play mechanics. Both movement up and firing the laser should use some form of energy, returning to surface ( where the Limar will be ) will recharge this energy. Also at this point the ores stored in the mole should be removed, and points/credits/score/dollarpounds should be added.
5.Lighting. Currently everything looks really bland. I need to add some light sources in to improve how things look.
Five points, and five hours till Saturday, hmmm, maybe that is a sign of the state the game will be in on Saturday. I can but hope 🙂
tl:dr; everything going better than I had hoped – and youtube sucks
Only just managed to get it working in time for the end of hour video – which is currently uploading now, automagic tweet will show the location, will come back and edit all the posts at the end of this five hours. Terrain is now deformed around the mole as the mole moves around the asteroid.
( forgot to change the aspect ratio before recording – d’oh )
