Level 03 Sandbox Exit

I finally got around to creating a level exit scenario for the Sandbox level. It took me a little while to come up with something I was happy with that fit into the theme of the other items in the sandbox. What I eventually came up with was a mound with a door fashioned out of Popsicle sticks and mouse trap parts. The mound has a hole with a black collider inside of it so that when Bud has both keys the door will open and he will be able to enter into the black collider which will load up the Tree house level, right now I just have it loading up the "Thanks for Playing Screen" just for simplicity sake for now. But yeah that's my exit for level 03 and the Tree house level you are more than likely already very familiar with if you've been keeping up with my posts ;)

Sand Box Level Updates

I've made a lot of changes and additions to the Sand Box level this week. I played around with the Blob Shadow projectors for the Potato Beetles so now they project the blob shadow offset in accordance to the sun's position in the sky.

I added a terrain to the outside of the Sand Box, it's never really meant to be seen, it's more there as a place to put the trees which I figured made a nice touch the the scenic background detail to this level. They cast nice shadows onto the sand terrain inside of the Sand Box and on the accompanying toys inside of the Sand Box.

I'm still working on tweaking the Sand Box shooting robot's fire control a little, it's taking a bit of testing it out trial and error to see what works best. Sometimes if you just keep Bud the Spud moving and zigzag a lot you can usually get by the wildly shooting robot but sometimes he gets a lucky shot in and it's curtains for Bud. I'm trying to get it so it's that good balance between not being too easy but not too difficult.

I'm thinking about adding some more scenic details outside of the Sand Box like perhaps a row of those little garden fences from level 02 perhaps in the form of rendered images on 2d planes to save on the poly count. I'll try it out perhaps tomorrow and see if it looks good for the scene.

I'm very pleased with how this level is shaping up with the new shadows cast into the Sand Box by the trees outside of the Sand Box. I find it breaks up the look of the sand terrain very nicely and makes for a more vibrant environment.

I need to do something with these toy wind up robots that patrol the mote bridge, I need to find some way to make their patrol pattern a little more complex just so they are more of a challenge for Bud to avoid while attempting to cross the bridge. I'm wondering if perhaps I can place Auto Way points onto different layers and have them ignore way points that are on another layer, I've never tried that before so I'm not sure but if I can do it that way then it may be possible for me to perhaps make a more complex patrol pattern for the toy wind up robots to follow. Something else I'll try and experiment with tomorrow as well perhaps.



Chattering Toy Teeth Character

Bud the Spud is going to have a new toy enemy to deal with in the Sand Box Level these comical looking Toy Chattering Teeth that will chase after and snap at Bud the Spud.

Right now just a WIP but soon to be finished. I'm thinking that this will be a toy he will be able to destroy by jumping on top of. Not sure what manor of destruction I should give the toy teeth for when Bud jumps on them though??

Sand Box Shark

I have finished all the details for the Sand Box with the final addition of the Toy Rubber Shark you can see here. I was going to animate the jaws of the shark to open and close at intervals of a few seconds or so but I thought maybe what I might do just for simplicity is to just make the teeth hurt Bud the Spud if he lands on them. Maybe I might decide to animate the shark latter on I don't know. but for now I'm anxious to get the Sand Box level built so I can export it into Unity 3D and start adding the material textures and code the surface effects for particle foot dust and sound as my character walks across the sand box terrain and other objects. I made a simple bridge that is just a slab of plastic that has a red brick texture on it for now simply because I could not immediately think of anything special to make for a bridge to cross the mote to the sand castle. If I think of something better later on down the road I'll replace it with whatever i create, but for now this plastic slab will serve a suitable albeit temporary solution to my "What to do for a bridge?" conundrum ;)

Detailing the Sand Box Continued

In continuing with adding details to the Sand Box I've added another toy boat, this time a cute little plastic tug boat. I was going to place it over along side the other toy boat but thought maybe it might be best to spread stuff out a little as I've lots of space in the Sand Box to work with. This one is more for decoration as it's not really useful for hiding stuff inside for Bud to collect. But it adds something to explore.

I started work on creating a toy rubber Shark for the Sand Box that will serve a good purpose of hiding things inside as it's hollow and will be quite large that Bud will be able to go inside of it.

You can see a work in progress of the toy rubber Shark here. I've still got some geometry to fix up a bit and then I'll have to UVW texture map it. It not animated although I did tinker with the idea of having the jaws snap open and closed so that Bud would have to time going inside of the shark just right, I may still do that as it's kind of a cool idea.??

Once the Shark is done I need to come up with something to use as a bridge to cross over the mote to the Sand Castle. I thought of making it out of Popsicle sticks but I have enough of those as fences along the mote edge so I want something different to use as a bridge, I'm not sure what at the moment. Maybe I might make it out of the toy blocks but I'm thinking something else might be a cooler idea, just not sure what yet though, Eh! Something will spring to mind I'm sure :)

Sand Box Level Details

While I'm still struggling a little to work out the code for my revolving shooting robot for the Sand Box level I figured I'd take a break from that frustration and keep working on adding detail to the Sand Box. I've added toy wooden blocks, a plastic bucket with sand in it. A good place to perhaps hide a key maybe. I've added a rusty yellow painted beach shovel.

I got some more mileage out of those numbered and lettered toy wooden blocks by adding a few more in with the new toy wooden blocks. I may take a few of these and see if I can arrange them like a small house that I can hide a key inside of also.

The Sand Box covers quite a large area so I have a lot of open space to add all sorts of toys. I might add a little more sand castle structure in the middle of the sand box. I want to make a toy boat of some kind. I was browsing on Google looking for toy boats to see if I could get some idea of what would make a cool sand box toy boat, I found a few images I saved into a folder for reference later on to perhaps create something that will look cool like a beached boat. I'm even thinking about perhaps adding one of those rubber sharks we used to have as kids because they were hollow and I'm thinking that "Bud the Spud" could go inside of the shark which to him would be like a whale. Inside I could either hide a key or place fertilizer pellets inside.

I made a place holder area in the ground for where the Revolving rusty toy robot torso will be placed. As you can see here I have him in the scene rendered in Max 8. The final export will not include him as he will be a prefab in Unity 3D that I will drag into the scene and place him in this location with hopefully by then a working code. Right now I have him performing his animation when Bud gets within range but his fireballs are instantiating inside of his chest area and exploding right away as opposed to flying away from where he shoots from. So I have to look into why it's doing that and try to fix that. I have a few ideas on what the problem might be but it's going to take some more playing around with the code to really figure it out.

I created some Popsicle sticks of varied flavors (used of course) to serve as a little fence along the mote area by the sand castle. Bud can easily jump the fence but why would he as it would be suicide to jump into the mote filled with muddy water.

Here in this scene and the one above you can see some of the Popsicle stick fence along the mote edge behind the toy rubber duck and some being used as fencing by the bridge entry area by where the toy revolving robot is placed.

I can't wait to get this model all done with all the cool stuff and more I've mentioned above and placed into Unity 3D as this is going to be such a fun level to work with with a few worms, potato beetles and one or two of those blue wind up sparking robots wandering around.

Sand Box Robot Set Up and Testing

I was hoping to have something a little more constructive accomplished between yesterday and today, but I was having some issues trying to code my robot to work properly. You can see here in my testing area, which is a simple scene in which I test stuff out before making it into a prefab to place into game scenes later on. You may recall me mentioning that I should have been able to modify the machine gun sentry script to work for my robot. Well yes and no. Seems I can get it to partially work the way I want. I have his animations all set up as:

• Aware
• Shoot
• Deactivate

Aware: is supposed to play a short animation where the robots moves and shifts a little buried in the sand and his chest doors pop open to reveal his guns as bud the Spud gets within a certain range.

Shoot: is supposed to then play the animation in which the robot torso spins 360 degrees 1 turn but is a looped animation.

Deactivate: Is supposed to play an animation where the chest doors close as the robot guns retract back inside of his chest area.

Sounds simple enough right? Until you get to start trying to code it that is, still working on it.
The other issue that might kill this great idea with the robot, is that he might be too high poly for this type of attack scenario. In making him in Max 8 I was trying very hard to keep him as low to medium poly as I could without sacrificing too much detail in the robot. But when he animates in Unity 3d's editor the whole scene slows to a crawl, so I might in the long run just have him as a nice sand box decoration :( (sadness) because I was really liking the idea of placing him right by the bridge crossing the sand castle mote. I suppose I can rework him in Max 8 and try and bring his poly count down a lot more. That is indeed if that is the issue as it could be the machine gun script rotating him as well as his rotation animation playing at the same time.

I tried making my own script similar to the "Jack in a Box" script but got really weird results like the animations would play making the robot move way below his desired location, so I've no idea what was going on there as it works for the "Jack in a Box." ??

Sand Box Level Toy Robot

I made a toy robot for the sand box level of my game. He's a broken down rusty toy robot that will give Bud the Spud some trouble if he gets within range. He has no legs and bud will find him buried in the sand up to his waist guarding the entry way to the bridge that will cross the mote to the sand castle on the other side. This toy robot will be a little lopsided so when his chest doors pop open and his cannons pop out and start shooting his torso will spin and he'll shoot deadly fireballs all over the place in a lopsided 360 degree circle. He has no aim being just a toy robot but even still if Bud should get hit by a fire ball it's curtains for Bud the Spud. Similar to the blue wind up robots what they lack in intelligence they make up for in deadliness.

I have him all rigged for animation so tomorrow that will be my next task, animate his attack sequence and then export him into Unity 3D for the fun code stuff. My thought is that he should work pretty much the same way that the machine gun turrets work in the FPS tutorial. He'll have an attack range although he will not rotate and deliberately shoot towards the player, he'll just start shooting while spinning around in circles. 

Sand Box Level 03 WIP

I have been working all weekend on the new level 03 which as you may recall from my last post that this will become level 03 and what I was working on as level 03 the "Tree House" will in fact become level 04 ;) Anyways here is a sneak peek at the sand box level in progress being constructed in Max 8. The sand texture may change once I get the final finished version into Unity 3D, right now this is a quick and dirty texture I whipped up in Max 8 just so I can better see how the overall effect will be. If you look closely you can see that I have already begun adding objects for Bud the Spud to explore in the Sand Box. You can see a toy rubber ducky that I was working on over the weekend.

Here you can see a better view of the toy rubber ducky rendered in Max 8. I created a dirty texture for it so it looks well used. In the top image you can see a toy plastic beach bucket which I figure will be a great place to hide some Fertilizer Pellets for Bud to collect. The sand castle in the corner will serve as the exit to the level once Bud has found the two keys needed to unlock the door to the Tree House level. There is lots more I need to add like some toy wooden blocks, perhaps a plastic shovel, a bridge of some kind to cross the mote and a few other sand box type toys that would be typical of a scenario like this. It's going to be a fun level to create, and best of all I'll have another cool level to use those toy wind up robots in.

Changing the Level Order

Make Room for Sand Box

Last night at about 3 AM I had a idea that woke me up about my game levels. Right now I have the Underground level & training area where "Bud the Spud" starts out and then level 02 which is the back yard and then we go to level 03 which is the muddy bog area where the Tree House is and exit pipe to the Grain Elevator level, but what I need is a Kids Sand Box level that can be right after the back yard area because the kind of go together, then have the Tree House level after that, so what I've been working on as level 03 will become Level 04 and the Sand Box Level will be level 03. I hope that made sense? In level 04 I can introduce the "Hunter Potato Beetles" I had mentioned in last night's post. 

The Sand box level can have all sorts of cool stuff like toys, a sand castle, I can do some more with my "Toy Wind Up Robots." Do a very simple terrain around the Sand Box just as a lead in and out of that area, keep it very simple with only a few obstacles. I've got so many cool ideas for toys and challenges in the Sand Box. I can't wait to get started on it. But seeing how Level 04 (formerly level 03) is nearly done I'm going to finish that up first.

Level 03 Additions and Detailing

I did a little more work on the Level 03 exit pipe by adding a nice particle effect for the water splashing the surface of the mud bog as it comes out of the pipe. I also made some new rocks just to add a bit more variety in the amount of different rocks that are scattered about the level terrain.

I've also added a lot more detail to the terrain by adding more of the medium poly blades of grass, some more bushes, new rocks, scattered some toadstools around and added a couple more trashed mashed potato boxes to the terrain. I added about 4 or five more Potato Beetles around this previously undeveloped part of the terrain. Now it's really starting to come to life more and have a lot more to explore and look at.

I was thinking about possible making a mini lookout deck on that tree you see in the immediate background as a possible location to place another game pick up item on top of that Bud would need to figure out how to climb up there to get it. I'm not sure if I will do that it's just something rattling around in my head at the moment as a possibility.

I worked out a way for bud the Spud to get over onto that little island you see in the background. I want to place something special over there but I am not sure what yet at the moment. I'm thinking about placing some special "Hunter Potato Beetles" on that island as an early introduction to them as later on there will be more of them. Basically they will be the same as the regular potato beetles only their color will be a little different and they will have a smarter AI in that they will actually hunt down Bud the Spud when he gets within range of them. I should be able to mod my "Alien Zombies" AI scripts to make them suitable for the new "Hunter potato beetles".

Level 03 Exit Pipe

I've worked out the level 03 exit pipe, as you can see it's located in the middle of another dangerous mud bog. "Oh no, how is he supposed to get to them!" Don't worry the scene is not yet complete. I still need to add rocks and stuff in the bog that Bud can use to get to the pipes. I was initially toying with the idea of introducing another non player character, some kind of bug or animal that would swim back and forth across the bog that Bud would have to hitch a ride on. I might still do that if I can think of something suitable. In the meantime I figured I would share a screen capture of how the ending to level 03 is shaping up. I still have to do some terrain tweaking and drop in some Potato Beetles and Worms for Bud to deal with on this little island but outside of that I think level 03 is pretty much done, other stuff I can add if something cool comes to mind later on down the road.

The Wall

I've already started work on the exit area for level 03. Here you can see the stone and wood wall that fences in the Grain Elevator which is the next level for Bud the Spud to deal with. In the center of that mud bog between the walls is where I am going to place an exit pipe that will take bud to the 4th level so long as he has collected the two keys necessary to unlock the door to the pipe.

Right now this little island is pretty sparse and I've not added any Potato Beetles or worms for Bud to deal with here yet either. I have added some trees and some scenic details like rocks and painted the terrain a little to give it more detail. But not much yet. The wall has been a big step forward in getting this level more nearer to completion. I still have some tweaking to do with the toy robots in the Tree House and perhaps some additional stuff for Bud to do on the Lookout deck of the Tree House but all of that is minor detail oriented stuff that can be done later.

Aditional Tweakings

I kept playing around with the placement of the mouse trap along the narrow passageway behind the trap door in the floor of the Tree House to see what would work best. It took me a while to get a placement of things that worked properly. First the robot kept walking too close or in some tweaking over the mouse trap which of course might make some say; "How come the Robot doesn't trip the traps?" and justly so I figured so I moved the trap back a little and shortened the distance between the robot's auto waypoints so that way he takes a shorter trip back and forth and does not run over the trap. The scenario makes more sense to me now.

I also added a large support column just behind the Trap Door so it has something to lean against and also to add another obstruction along that narrow path that the robot patrols back and forth down. You can sort of see it in the first image but I figured I would take a better screen capture so you can see it better. This now works very well in that bud the Spud must now take a little more care in traversing the narrow passageway. he can follow behind the robot and then duck into open spaces along the toy blocks or along the side with the trap door.

There is a new toy space ball in the main part of the Tree House that Bud can use to trip the mouse trap if he likes. It's not really necessary as he can easily jump over the trap, but if he had to make a hasty retreat from the robot it would suck to end up accidentally tripping the mouse trap during such a retreat ;) this space ball toy is smaller in size from the one on the upper lookout deck.

I have added an extra health pick up item just over top of the big space ball toy on the lookout deck, you can see it just to the left of the Sun flare. there are two way Bud can get it, he can either jump on top of the ball and then do a double jump in the air or he can jump up on top of the Apple crates and make a jump for it, while he's up on top of the crates he might as well get the extra life heart as well. You can see inside of the Apple crate there are five Fertilizer Pellet pick ups also and another mouse trap to watch out for.

Sorry for the extra long post. I was going to post yesterday but I was so busy staring at code for the toy robot all day trying to figure out why he is not dishing out damage using his "Hit position," instead he seems to be using his character controller to do damage to Bud but I want it to be if Bud come in contact with those electrical sparks. Clearly more tweaking to do on that. Now you might recall me mentioning that Bud can drop the robot down through the hole by using the toy space ball to force the robot to accidentally walk over the hole in the floor and fall down to his destruction.

1. Sometime during testing I noticed that the robot would only get stuck in the hole so I needed to make an extra "Robot Death Collider" object to tell the robot to play a grinding sort of stuck motor sound and then explode should he just become stuck as opposed to falling far below to the other "Robot Death Collider" object.
2. As I had mentioned I threw it in as a "What if" factor. but it's such a difficult thing to actually try and do I'm thinking that this would be a perfect scenario for the exploded robot to leave behind a special game object when he explodes, maybe perhaps a "Super Fertilizer Pellet" that is of different color and is worth 10 or 20 Pellets!

Mouse Traps Laid

After much frustration trying to figure out why my character was not taking damage from the mouse traps I finally got the problem solved with some help from Unity Answers. In the end I still do not know why he was not taking damage from the mouse traps because apart from not having a character controller the mouse traps are set up the same way as enemy characters, they each have a collider object set as a trigger which tells the character (Bud)'s "Hurt Collider" to take damage to the players health. now you would think that would be simple right? but nope, it was just NOT working for some unknown to me reason. Well it's fixed now by going a slightly different route in the Mouse Traps script.

So now the traps are functioning as they are supposed to and Bud gets a nasty 25 point damage if he trips one of these pesky things. The good thing is, is that if there is a ball near by Bud can push the ball so it rolls over a mouse trap and that will set it off, no more mouse trap problem because once a trap is tripped it's no longer a threat. I've placed two traps in the Tree House, I might place one more but not sure where yet, perhaps on the upper lookout deck.

Note: I tried today to see if I could drop the robot off of the Tree House look out deck so I would be able to do a screen capture of the robot exploding as he drops to the ground but it took me a long time to get it to happen just once and I was not fast enough to get to a good vantage point to quickly hit the print screen button, Oh I say him blow to bits alright but was just not fast enough to hit the capture button. Maybe next time, like I say it's REALLY thrown in as a "What if" factor and tricky to do, but it can be done and he explodes real nice too. I used the Big explosion with the fragments from the "Detonator pack" so it's really cool to watch ;)

Mouse Traps

"Bud the Spud" has a new game item to watch out for, "Mouse Traps." There will be a few of these in the Tree House in level 03 for Bud to have to avoid. I'm going to place one of these along the path the toy wind up robot patrols inside of the Tree House because getting past that robot is still way too easy and needs another dangerous obstacle just to make it less easy to just dodge by the robot. I've not really decided on the damage amount these pesky things will dish out if bud accidentally runs into one. I'm thinking a good 25 should be pretty fair, but I'll make it a variable so I can change it easily in the inspector in Unity 3D's editor.

When I was designing the mouse trap I thought about going with the classic "Victor" mouse traps but did not want any recognizable company names used so instead I came up with "Snag Em" mouse traps, a non existent company I dreamed up just for this purpose. Do you like the "Snag Em" logo ;)

Bouncing Balls and Robot Death

I kept thinking today when I was out fro my bike ride that my new space toy ball was missing something, but what was it, and then around the 5 mile mark it hit me, "My ball need sound and a bounce ability" which it was lacking. So after i got home I worked on giving the ball some bounce using the physics bounce material and playing around with the settings. Then I added the sound effect for when the ball bounces.

Next was the Toy robots in the Tree House. Now it's not likely that you can get the one inside of the Tree House to fall out and to the ground below but the one on the upper look out deck it is possible using the ball to force the robot to walk off of the edge or fall through the hole in the floor. I wish I could show you a sweet screen capture of the toy robot falling and then exploding with a nice robot exploding sound effect but it's very tricky to do and more sort of thrown in as the "What if" factor ;) Maybe over the course of game testing if I come up with sure fire method of dispatching the robot out of the Tree House I'll capture a video clip and upload it to my YouTube and then post it here ;)

Buds new Pushable Toy Ball

OK I've got the toy space ball placed into my scene in the Tree House as you can see. Now the ball is serving a good purpose to partially hide the hole in the floor that Bud will need to drop down in order to find the 2nd key he needs. I also placed an extra life heart on top of the 2nd wooden apple box on top of the one you see here, you'll know when extra life hearts are near by by the sound of the beating heart, that's your clue that one is close.

So with that little job out of the way now I just need to work on the ground level stuff for Bud the Spud to deal with, fix up some of the terrain texture, perhaps add another challenge, workout the level exit for this level and then I think I'll be basically done with level 03, although I do want to tweak the scenario with the wind up toy robot inside of the Tree House as I still feel he is too easy to avoid. I'm not really sure what to do about that yet.

A New Ball For Bud to Push

You might recall from an earlier post that I was wanting to do something on the upper look out deck of the Tree House to make things more challenging. You might recall me mentioning that Bud the Spud will need to drop through a hole in the floor in order to land on one of the tree branches below in order to find one of the keys needed to unlock the door to the next level. Maybe, maybe not, but anyways yes that was something that had been rattling around in the back of my head. So what I figured was to place a new ball for Bud to have to push out of the way from over top of the hole in the floor. I figure it will give him something he need to do along with watching out for the sparking wind up toy robot that patrols back and forth across the floor. So I've made a new space toy ball for that very purpose. Why is it sometime the simplest models take a long time, the model is just a sphere I made in Max 8, what could be simpler right, even making the Unwrap UVW template was supper simple, but texturing it in Photoshop is what REALLY vampired my time. As you can see it's no simple map, the seems had to match up just right. But oh well, it's done now so all I have to do is export it to FBX and import that into Unity 3D and make it work the same way the "Soccer ball" from level 2 works, no biggie I'll be done that lickedy split ;)

Bud the Spud With Jack in a Box

After a fair amount more tweaking my initial problem with the weird "Flipped Normals" of my FBX import from Max 8 into Unity 3D still unsolved I found a somewhat workable/not too bad solution (by no means permanent). What I did was use a "Transparent/Cutout/DiffuseBack" shader which I'm sure is WAY more complicated than what I actually need but at least it's showing my "Jack in a Box" head to look somewhat normal. I still have the point light inside of it tough. When I saved it into a prefab and dropped it into my Tree House scene I had to dial back the point light's intensity quite a bit but as you can see here it looks not too bad since I can't light map dynamic objects. I did however light map the tin box, lid, hinge and front tab so at least those parts appear to cast and receive shadows from the rest of the environment.

This will do until I can find a more permanent solution to the stupid "Normals being flipped" issue.