#madewitunity

[mariobaronedev]

Plundersail Title Screen!

The Pirate ship-building game, Plundersail is well and truly up to its final stretch of production, the game is almost complete, and we’re now knuckling down and dotting t’s and crossing our i’s! A small Work in Progress for Plundersail’s title screen, let me know what you think?

We originally wanted an interactive ship scene where the player would take control of a large ship, but thought we should go with something a bit more modest!  More Soon!

[bokchoydev-blog]

The targeting system pretty much works now. Really haven’t had much time to dev with class and work but slow and steady progress is still progress, right? Also, really need to figure out how to make less blurry webms.

[thefirst200]

LoveMaze: Pickups modelling, texturing, lighting

Finally able to get back into it this week after sorting out leaving my job and having a cold for most of last week. I decided to focus on LoveMaze for the next little while because as I mentioned in the last post, it’s probably the furthest along of my current projects.  Over the last couple of days I’ve just been figuring out how to present the various pickups that are scattered throughout the labyrinth. I started with the first one, and used a photograph of an old CD-R I had lying around to play around with filters in Photoshop.

I opted for the watercolour filter because I pretty much just like how it looks. I’m not going to say why it’s labelled ‘Wayne’s World 2′, but that was added just by typing it out and using the Smudge tool to distort it a little. I’m particularily happy with how the base of the CD turned out- from a distance it looks almost like a photograph, but when you get up close you can see the detail of the brushstrokes. In a 3D environment this is quite interesting visually, as the player is constantly moving towards, away from, and around the object. I’ll think I’ll adopt this watercolour look as the environment’s visual theme, doing what I can by editing photographs, and painting in details to give the pickups a bit of a more stylistic look. 

Once the objects were in Unity, I was able to position them together and add the proper materials. I also put together a simple script to cause the objects the float up and down and rotate, the first step in presenting them as an important object in the environment.

The script essentially ensures that the object is constantly rotating at a speed of 50 degrees per second counter-clockwise. It also moves it up in the world 0.5 units per second for 1.5 seconds, then moves it down. The logic dictates that when it’s not moving up, it’s moving down, and vice versa. With all of that in place, I wanted to further emphasize the object’s importance with some lighting. I started with a fairly strong spotlight illuminating the object from above, which gave it a solid base and directed the player’s eye towards it in the otherwise dark environment. Unfortunately this meant that the base of the CD model, an important element, was in shadow, so I placed another, less powerful spotlight below the object, and disabled shadows. Finally, I added a third light in front of the object on the ground, facing up at an angle, to create a bit of a glint in the lenses of the sunglasses. 

This is how it looks in Unity. There’s still some tweaking to do, but as a basic layout I’m happy with it. I’m guessing that each pickup will need to have it’s own individual lighting, but as a general purpose setup I think this works pretty well, and hopefully the others won’t require too much tweaking. I’m going to focus on texturing, positioning, and lighting the rest of the pickups over the next few days, so hopefully that will be done relatively quickly. There are a few issues I’ll have to resolve (Unity renders transparent objects in a really weird way, as you can see by the shadow of the lenses in the below GIF), but I’ll cross those bridges when I get to them.