Click to move...

...it sounds so simple, right?

Well, it isn't. First of all I've spent way too long just getting the ground mesh in and working - importing the curves from Illustrator looked awesomely easy but resulted in insanely messy meshes. Once I got the meshes looking kind of alright the scale from Maya to Unity was all messed up AND THEN I realised that the level design wasn't built for screen proportions in the first place so I had to go back to Illustrator to stretch out the level paths and start all over again.

Oh. Dear.

Anyway. I got there in the end. 

As for the actual click-to-move mechanic - which sounds so simple - I'm a little bit stuck but looking into a bunch of options. Who knew that making a massive level with a million tunnels could prove complex when there isn't any pathfinding or navmesh functionality in the free version of Unity? Pfft. One option is to use splines, one is to use free plugins for pathfinding, another is to try to hack together a mix of both combined with some scripting and/or state machines. I'll carry on tomorrow now that I have the actual ground mesh working and after I get some rest... Blargh!

I made a game!

I spent yesterday following a fabulous Unity tutorial to get familiar with the editor. I even made a game! If you can call it that... Haha! It's quite terrible, but it has a menu, win/lose conditions (get a score of 10 to win), a countdown timer plus triggers for particle effects, colour changes and audio. It also taught me some super useful things about raycasting, moving objects around and how to use object tags, which I'll need to use to get my character movement working.


AND, look at all the code I wrote! Look! Look!

I'm trying to enjoy this smug feeling as much as possible, because I know it won't last. And how do I know that? Because I've spent this morning adding ALL the work for this project to Hansoft:

Provided I do absolutely everything bang on time, this schedule gives me a finishing date of around the 20th of May. Oh dear. However, this list includes art. Lots of it. Even animation. Lots of pretties will have to be sacrificed - but I knew that from the start. I never expected to actually make a fully functioning point and click game with final assets. But now that it's all in Hansoft I'll be able to shuffle things around and cut things as I go along, while keeping a good overview of the project.

Here's this week's sprint:

Wish me luck...

UI elements and movement mechanics

Yesterday I created the UI elements I need for the prototype.

The top icons are the character selection icons, and the bottom ones are the items that can be picked up in the level.

I've also gotten Unity up and running, which is super exciting! The first - and probably most difficult thing - I want to implement is the character movement. I REALLY want to use a click-to-move mechanic as opposed to WASD-style direct control, but this requires some element of pathfinding since the free version of Unity doesn't support navmeshes. Cue headache...

I was trying to figure this out as I was falling asleep last night and I realised I might be able to just stick the characters on splines. It SHOULD work for this simple level - the tricky part being when and how to switch between different splines depending on where the player clicks. I should be able to hack that together with trigger boxes though... We'll see. There is a glimmer of hope though! Anyway, this is what I'll start with:

Here we go, wish me luck!

First pass of asset list done

Same file as yesterday!

I will update and change this sheet as I go along and figure out how things work, but for now it gives me a good place to start. Onwards to placeholder asset creation (for use both in the demo and in any design docs)...

Level functionality list

...can be found here! I've also started writing the asset list in the same document, but it's not quite finished yet. Hoping to have it done by tomorrow. At this point I would like to highlight the fact that all functionality has a much, much higher priority than the art assets... Once (or should I say "if") I get everything up and running I will pretty things up as much as I can, but ultimately I want to focus on building things.

I'm going to use Unity for this project because I'm dying to learn it, there's a ton of resources out there and because it should be flexible enough to handle the functionality I'm after. As soon as the asset list is done and everything is set up in Hansoft (which is working great, by the way) I'm off on a great big prototype adventure! Yaaaaay...! I haven't built anything in FOREVER so this will be so much fun!

Level: light version

Done!

I also tried to tone down the blotchiness of the dark level, but something's up with the layers... It really isn't rendering right when I paint. Oh well. The core illustrator file is intact so nothing's lost. Hopefully it will print OK if needed!

Next up: asset and feature lists...

Level: dark version

Here's the dark version of the level:

Illustrator and Photoshop decided that they didn't want to play nice with each other, hence the dark blotch in the corner... CMYK colours don't seem to render well with multiply layers and overlaid textures! I'll take another look at it as I finish the light version.