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.

Robot Avoidance Testing

As I had mentioned earlier this morning that I had planned to make the first wind up toy robot in the Tree House a bit more of a challenge to avoid. I've since made the trap door as you can see here which serves very well for blocking "Bud's" direction on the one side, I've also added a lot more toy wooden blocks to make the corridor more narrow to traverse. It's still very easy for Bud to avoid the robot though so I think I need to place something else along that wall with the toy blocks, Not sure what though as I'm trying to watch my poly counts because although those toy wooden blocks are fairly small, they do have beveled edges and angled corners as you can see if you look closely at them. So they will add up to be expensive I'm sure if I use too many of them, so far they seem to play with no problems at all in the editor and my Draw Calls are not bad at all so I think I'm doing really OK in that department. But yeah I'm wanting very much to make Bud's avoidance of this robot a lot more of a challenge so as bud will have to time running through the passageway a little more carefully before the robot turns around to walk back down the corridor between the blocks and trap door. I shortened the distance between his auto waypoints so that has helped a lot but I need to make something to place just after the toy blocks... Hmmm maybe an old kite because I can keep that pretty low poly and still have it look good and it might just be big and bulky enough to extend the obstacles along that wall just enough?? There's a thought ;)

Tweakings

Feels like I didn't get much accomplished yesterday even though I was hard at it all day. I downloaded the latest version of Unity 3D because I had read online about "Light Probes" and was very anxious to try them out but it turns out that all the cool new addition they have made to the latest version of unity like built in Path Finding, the Light Probes and a bunch of other cool stuff is all pro. only :( Oh well, at least the software is up to date and hopefully less buggy which will hopefully mean less crashes ;)

Anyways I was mostly making a lot of tweaks after updating Unity, I had to re bake my light maps because the old ones were "FUBAR" for some reason. I was toying around quite a bit in the Tree House trying to make it so the toy wind up robot in the main part of the Tree House is a little bit more of a challenge to pass since he just walks back and forth between two auto waypoints. I placed in some more wooden apple crates and arranged them so as they effectively block off the back part so that way Bud the Spud will have to go past the robot. I need to make an open trap door to use as a wall to also block off the path he must take along the side of the opening in the floor he gets into the Tree House by so that way he will have a more narrow corridor to walk through with the toy wooden blocks on one side and the open trap door on the other with the robot walking back and forth between the two sets of obstructions, and that should do nicely for more of a challenge in the Tree House. Next I'll need to do something similar on the upper deck as that wind up toy robot is just as easy to avoid. I'm not sure what though, maybe another apple crate and toy block arrangement or another type of wooden box that I'll need to make, paint cans or other toys maybe?? I was thinking about a pushable block that perhaps he will have to move out of the way covering the hole in the upper deck floor that he needs to drop through onto the branches below in order to find the 2nd key??

Toy Wooden Blocks Added



I added some toy wooden blocks to the Tree House for bud to use to help avoid the toy wind up robot in the main part of the Tree House. They are more for scenic detail than actual use although I think if I was to make it so the toy robot just patrolled back and forth along this one side of the Tree House then they would serve more of a purpose in helping Bud avoid the robot, maybe I might experiment a bit with that just to make another challenge to overcome in the Tree House. But they turned out very nice and I'm sure I will no doubt find more practical uses for them later on down the road as the game develops.