Dev Diary - Week 2: Asset Creation Method

For my game I"m using mainly 3D assets with only a small amount of 2D ones. For the 3D assets, I've been using Maya and for the 2D ones, I've been using Photoshop. 

For the fallen tree asset, I started in the feature spec, just drawing a simple image. This one was to demonstrate the hit box.

Then, I go into Maya, and begin creating the model.

I first made a cylinder object, then made the curved face into 8 sides. This follows the theme of the game being low poly. Like in the "reference" image above, there are small branches poking out, so I used the edge loop tool to divide up the log. Simply extruding the faces, moving them, scaling and rotating them was then done to make the branches look natural.

Once that was done, the model was exported as a .FBX to the unity assets folder, along with the Maya file, so that I could easily edit the model in the future. Implementing it into the game is the next step of the process.

For this object, it will be either spawning on the top or bottom of the road, poking inwards. So I get the model in the scene view and make it a child of an empty game object which is in the centre of the road. Simply inverting the Z scale of the parent game object flips the model to either side of the road.

A box collider was them added and the object was tagged as "SolidObstical". All the rest is done in the code, where it is spawned and placed in the game world.

As for the green appearance of the log though, that is just a placeholder material for now.

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For 2D assets, Photoshop is used. In the case of the pothole object, it is a sprite that is placed onto a quad in the game world.

In Photoshop, a white oval with some outline detail is created. The reason it is white, is because in Unity, the colour can be tinted to be whatever colour is needed. So if I was to change the road colour or if the pothole was too dark for example, I wouldn't need to go into Photoshop and change the colours around. All I need to do is move a simple slider inside of Unity.

Once the sprite is complete, it is saved as a PSD to the Unity project asset folder, ready for use.

To make it an object in the world, first a quad object is created. Then a material with the sprite as the texture is made and placed on the quad. The material is set to cutout, so that the transparent parts of the sprite are transparent. Then a simple sphere collider is added, and the object is tagged as "NonSolidObstical". 

That is it. It's pretty much a repeated process for all the 3D models and 2D sprites in the game.

Dev Diary - Week 1: Barnstorming Pitch

For Wednesday, we were assigned to make a pitch video about our Barnstorming / randomly assigned artist game we were going to create. I got the artist Edward Hopper, who was a prominent American oil painter back in the early 1900's. This is the video I made:

As you can see, I wouldn't consider it that much of a pitch. That's because at the time I didn't have a proper idea of what I was going to do. Since his paintings were quite realistic and his ideas of solitude and loneliness were quite abstract for me, implementing that into Barnstorming was not an easy task.

What I did end up going with though, was this:

The player is a car driving along a dirt road. They are driving away from the big city, back to the countryside. They need to go through gas stations to progress through the levels and avoid potholes and fallen trees. The player is viewed through the window of a train that is following the car. There will be 3 levels in the game, dawn, dusk and midnight, each with a different difficulty and lighting.

Many of these elements were talked about in the video, as well as discussed during the feedback session afterwards with my group. Feedback was generally good. I did have to explain the odd nature of the video but by the end of it they got a grasp of what I was going on about.

They liked that unlike the original Barnstorming, you can lose my version. If your car gets behind the left border of the train window it happens and my group seemed to like that. They also gave me ideas on what to add like:

• Have obstacles be cars coming from the opposite direction.
• Replace the birds with other cars.
• And some others.

The problem with these ideas though is that it doesn't really go along with the theme of Hopper's paintings. I'm not sure if I explained it well enough in the video, but Hopper was quite a reserved man who saw the crowded big city lifestyle as a lonely one since no one really knows anyone. I want my game to be an attempt to escape the big city life and get back out to the countryside, by the means of many Hopper inspired elements.