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.



Sand Box Robot Fire Control

I was able to get the robot working pretty close to the way I originally wanted in that he shoots fire balls in a circular pattern, the only thing is, is that he deliberately targets my player which I did not want I wanted just a random shooting of fire balls in an off set circular pattern. But this does make getting across that mote bridge a lot more difficult which is good in many ways as it should NOT be easy! So I may leave him like this with perhaps a little more tweaking on his fire rate. Right now it's pretty good and gives Bud the Spud a good deal to worry about if he gets close to that bridge entry way. One hit and it's "Mashed" Bud the Spud!

I also added in some Potato Beetles into the Sand Box and placed a key pick up inside of the toy rubber Shark and another key on top of the Sand Castle tower. I placed a health pick up way above the toy Rubber Duck so Bud will have to do a double flip jump in order to get it and I placed an extra life heart on top of the Toy Wooden blocks. Over all I'm pretty happy with the way this level is shaping up. I still need to make the entry and exit scenario but it's getting pretty close to being finished.

I want to add the toy Chattering Teeth character but I'm having difficulty with the way the character works and I'm pretty sure it has to do with my Max 8 exporting my FBX files out as "Z" up instead of "Y" up, the exporter says it's exporting as "Y" up but when I get it into Unity 3D it shows up as "Z" up?? Very frustrating I can tell you because I'm sure this is the reason it's making my code not work as it should. It seems that if bud gets attacked with his back facing the enemy then he takes damage but if he is facing the enemy then those toy teeth could chomp away all day and do no damage??? I have NO idea why this is the case but it's putting a block on my progress here. I tried re installing Max 8 today to see if maybe that would fix the problem... it didn't, so I'll keep at trying to figure out what that Frack the problem is while I work on getting some of the other stuff done I need doing.

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 ;)

Wind Up Robots Added to the Tree House

It took me a little while to play around with their waypoints but the Toy Wind Up Robots are now on patrol in the Tree House in level 03 of my "Bud the Spud" game. I was having some problems trying to keep the robot on the top look out deck from wanting to walk towards the waypoints in the actual Tree House, I had to do a lot of experimenting moving them around so as they would not be in line with the ones below. After much tweaking and playing around I think I have something workable. The robot in the Tree House walks along 4 waypoints arranged in a sort of box pattern of 3 sides;

_____
|        |
|        |

Sort of like that across the floor of the Tree House. The robot above walks a similar pattern, it took me some tweaking to get it so as he passes very close the hole in the deck that Bud must fall through onto the tree branch below. That way if he's not looking out and takes to long trying to figure out which angle is best to drop down from and is not aware then a sparking wind up robot will zap him.

Wind Up Robot & Other Discoveries

Well I've had quite the busy weekend with all sorts of tweaking going on and trying to figure out new stuff. One thing that had always been bugging me very badly about my blood splats effects was that because I'm using a top down projector to instantiate blood splats whenever my enemies are killed by "Bud the Spud" although it left behind a very nice blood splat effect that formed well against uneven terrain what would happen was if another enemy say was following close behind and would walk through the blood splat the projector would also project that blood splat on top of the enemy which looked very odd. Also when my enemies died and left behind a "Fertilizer Pellet" for Bud to pick up they too would be covered in blood from the instantiated projector, which I did not mind so much, but my other enemies passing through the effect, well that was another matter and did bother me quite a bit. I discovered over the weekend that if I place my game characters onto another layer like the "static" layer for instance and tell my projector to ignore that layer then it works perfectly. I guess I could make a new layer and call it "Characters" for simplicity. But in any event it works so now my projectors no longer cast a blood splat on top of my enemy characters if they pass through a nice gooey looking blood splat on the floor, How cool is that?

Next up was the challenge of creating my "Wind Up Robot" to patrol around in the Tree House for level 03. I wanted to be able to have him wander back and forth between "Auto Way Points" but I also wanted him to emit sparks that can hurt Bud if he gets hit by them... you might recall me mentioning that was my goal? Well it took me the better part of the day to get it working but I finally got it just how I want it using the "Walker Boys AiPatrol Script." I had to make some changes like "Tag" robot with a name; "robot" and then in the "Controller Collider Hurt Script" I had to add a few if statements and add a few Variables to the "Ai Patrol Script" and Viola! Success!

That particle effect for his sparking lightning bolts was fun too, I might tweak it a little more to add a secondary effect for a small shower of sparks to accompany the lightning bolts, I'll see ;) But what I've got works very well and now I have a walking wind up toy robot that will patrol and inflict damage, he does not attack Bud deliberately as he is simply a wind up toy but he'll dish out a good 35 damage which more than makes up for his lack of intelligence ;)

Potato Beetle Damage

FINALLY!! Some headway today! With Chad Walker's help from "Walker Boys Studio" I was able to get my Potato Beetle characters to take two hits from bud before they are killed. The first hit makes them do a nice little gooey blood spurt and then they look damaged, the 2nd hit kills them with a bigger blood splash and they leave behind a nice gooey mess. I'm using a projector for that still as it makes the blood splat go over the bumpy terrain more effectively than the instantiated plane with a transparent texture map that I was using several weeks back on my enemy worms. So that little bit is done, took me all day to figure it out. Code stuff that an experienced coder would just buzz through in seconds takes me all day to figure out Grrrr...!! Oh well... we live and learn ;)