Thursday 15 October 2015

Messing around with Terrain and lighting in Unity


This is completely and utterly irrelevant to the Cart game, I know. 

But I decided to carry on a little further with the Unity Developer's Course to get a bit of inspiration and see if I could get a few more ideas of how more efficiently to handle stuff like key and mouse inputs, amongst other things. 

So I started with the next section in the course.

I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this incredibly useful, nay wonderful set of features in Unity - the terrain editor. 

The picture above took me only a couple of hours, and uses a couple of features: Lens flare on the sun, a bit of mucking around with the directional lighting and the utterly beautiful water generation doodad. 

And of course, the Terrain editor.

I wrote a quick blog on the Unity course page showing you how to use the terrain moulding features - why not check it out?

Monday 12 October 2015

Modelling sessions

Before: 




After: 



Check out the old version at this link then check out the new at this link - and don't forget to check out the instructions they are the same for both!

I know, it has been a while since the last post, but for a very good reason!

I have finally gotten around to replacing those old cubes - most of them anyway - with actual 3D models of things!


Yes, it could use a little (lot!) more work, like putting textures on etc. but it is at least a start.


I just need to do the spice rack, get rid of that damn big blue thing on the left (freezer, obvs) and the spice rack on the far wall. Oh, and I suppose that I should add a sink to the thing, then the scene part of the kitchen is pretty much set, at least as far as scenery goes.

Cooking area before... : 


...and after:


In terms of modelling I've two big jobs to do - get the player model sorted out and get some actual foods prepared for the table - the latter is a bigger job but I'm a *lot* more scared of doing the player... that's going to need animation and all sort of things that I'm just not ready to research yet! 
The knife - No reason, I'm just really pleased with this model! (Kitchenware companies interested in using my design please contact me at EpiphanyGameStudios@gmail.com haha)!)

I'll be getting on with the food then as the next stage - my aim is to practice on making a simple burger and a hot dog before moving on to get about five decent, wholesome, easily modelled meals out there. 

The idea at this stage is to make a set of models for each item - left is the bun which comes as "cut" and "uncut" - below. By modifying the base object with various tools, such as the knife above, the object will then transition into a different state (at this stage 

managed with booleans but I am looking into using bitflags at some stage, if the code becomes complex enough to warrant it); the 3D model to be used would then depend on which state that particular object was in at the time - here a standard bun or a cut bun. 

When I have a few recipes made up a pattern should emerge about how best to organise the models and I can start to reuse the pattern on future things.

Five though should be enough different recipes to start working on the other main section of the game - the commerce; actually buying and selling ingredients and food stuffs, and once that's done, the main bulk of the game's actual functions are pretty much done!



Monday 5 October 2015

A slow week for Food Cart Express



Yep, you read it, not much has been going on in development of the Food Cart game as I've been sidetracked by trying to get a working version of another game up and running. 

So here you are: have a look at Doofer Shooter by following the link (a working title, obviously!) 

Controls are simple: WASD to move, click the left mouse to shoot, bullets will go from player to the mouse when its clicked. Couldn't be any simpler. Give it a try!

Of course its still all place holder - the important thing was getting the basic functions up and running: having a movable player, having that player able to shoot. 

The assets, such as they are, are all my own work, and its amazing how much of the time creating them takes... seriously, the actual engine - though admittedly not yet complete - took a couple of hours; the assets a couple of hours each it seems - even the really bad ones!

But there you go, that's what I've been up to this week - more to come!


-Tom