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.

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.

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 ;)

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.

Jack in a Box WIP II

OK we have our rather disturbing looking "Jack in a Box" 3D model completed. Now all I have to do is rig it for animation so that way when "Bud the Spud" either bumps into or gets within a certain distance, right now I'm leaning more to the actual bumping into because I'm thinking it more justifies the sudden unwinding of the "Jack in a Box", the box will spring open and give Bud a nice surprise, albeit a grim surprise with the note pinned to the disturbing looking clown from the "Rotten Potato."

I'm hoping to get the character rigging done today so that way I can either work on his animations later today or early tomorrow morning. It took me some time to try and find some google images of sinister looking clowns the dress up the box with, hopefully I can use the images in this circumstance, if not I'll just have to create my own, a pain in the ass but if I gotta then I gotta, no biggie. lol

Jack in a Box WIP

A sneak peek at the "Jack in a Box." This will be one of the first real clues for "Bud the Spud" about the "Rotten Potato." Bud will discover the "Jack in a Box" in the Tree House in level 03. The idea here is to have it so when Bud bumps into the Jack in a box it will automatically play a music box type of sound typical of these types of toys, then suddenly out will pop the Jack in the Box with a note pinned to it saying something like;

"Give up Bud the Spud, there is no hope!"
                                         -The Rotten potato
As you can see I've gone with a sort of twisted or disturbing looking type of Jack in a Box design to help reflect the madness of the "Rotten Potato." After all mass genocide is madness.
but there is hope;

"One Potato can make a difference." ;)

Scenic Details Added

Because bud is a small potato character his surroundings need to reflect this in some way, as you've no doubt noticed that everything is "potato character sized" in my game. In keeping with that in mind I wanted something more added to the terrain to keep that feeling of being a small character in mind, so I made these nice medium poly blades of grass that I can place here and there throughout the various levels that are outdoors and above ground. Here we can see "Bud the Spud" standing amongst some new blades of grass placed close the the base of the Tree House tree base. Thankfully the FBX file is only 175 kilobytes in size so it should not be too big of a deal for me to use a fair amount of them so long as I don't go overboard.

I was looking into how one places mass trees in Unity 3D to see if perhaps performance wise if that might be a better and maybe even more easier way to place these new blades of grass onto my game level terrain but even though I added the model as a new tree mesh it was not painting them onto my terrain for some reason so I don't know why that is, as I say it's a very reasonably sized model at only 175 KB??

Robot Avoidance Testing II

I mentioned earlier today about needing to add something extra along this passageway in order to make getting past the toy wind up robot a little more difficult for Bud the Spud. I went with the kite as a good object because it's long and a good size to lean up against the Tree House wall and rotate it's angle a little to take up space in the passageway making it more narrow and cluttered. The robot is still pretty easy to avoid but if you are not careful you'll get Bud "Zapped!" And since they are just stupid wind up toys don't forget that they dish out quite a bit of punishment which more than makes up for their simple minded nature ;)

Note: In some future blog posts I'm going to introduce game tips like this:

Game Tip 01: You've been trying to jump from rock to rock and sometimes you end up right on the edge of a rock with no where to go, death is certain right? Not always, sometimes you can save Bud if he is too close to the edge of a rock in the middle of a deadly mud bog. Here's how:
Do a extra high jump by jumping twice and pull back on your direction pad (d pad) or [ S ] on the keyboard, while Bud is high in the air he'll actually move backwards a small amount, keep doing this until you have enough rock under you to better maneuver into a good jump position.

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??

Bump Map & Beast Solution

I don't know if it's a correct solution but it's a solution that works. My problem was this; every time I ran the Beast Light Mapper I would loose my bump map or "Normal Maps" as Unity calls them. Now you can just imagine how very annoying that can be as bump maps I feel are crucial for giving a game a nice look of realism. I searched for hours, days for a solution to this issue figuring I can't be the only one who is having the same issue. Well this person suggested that and this other person said try this as it had worked for them and so on and so and so on, and either they were not explaining entirely well what exactly it was that they were doing or I was just missing something?? In any event nothing no one said was working for me. So today I thought;

"OK, what if after I run Beast I make a new Directional Light and set it at the same position and rotation in the sky and just tell it to be a real time light?"

Well Frack Me Freddy that worked!! As I say I don't know if it's the correct way but it seems to be a way that at least is simple and freaking works!! I had to adjust it's intensity a little but at least I have my specular materials & normal map effects back along with the beast light mapped shadows. HooAh! Now that's what I call a real KISS operation lol

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.

Testing with Control Pad

I finally broke down and picked up a Logitech Gamepad F310 today because it was on sale and I needed one BADLY to properly test out my game the way the good game gods intended my game to be played and just as I had suspected it plays like a dream with the game pad. I had to get comfortable with it for a quick moment after having been so familiar testing my game with just the keyboard and mouse which is fine too but the game pad F310 with dual joysticks by Logitech works like a dream, so for all you sissies that were bitching and moaning about how hard the character is to control I say Bah! Yur on crack! Get a game pad for PC and rock the Spud!!

Late Update: It took me a little bit of playing around with my new control pad to figure out how to get it to work in the Unity 3D's game editor but it was a lot simpler that I thought so now I can actually test out in the game editor as well as when my game is exported. Very cool!!

More Scenic Details to Level 03

After tweaking my "Toy Wind Up Robots" for Bud to deal with in the Tree House I started adding some scenic details to level 03. Here you can see "Bud the Spud" with an old beat up box of Mashed Potatoes. Needless to say this is a real WTF moment for Bud. I'm actually thinking of him saying something like that first time he comes across a trashed used box of mashed potatoes. Not really sure what the best way to approach that is yet as I only want him to say it the one time, maybe a game object that activates when collided with and then destroys itself once the audio clip has completed might be a way to go here??

Next I added some "Toxic Waste Barrels" to this muddy bog filled area. Here you can see Bud standing on a hill overlooking just one of the piles of dumped toxic waste barrels. I felt the fog was a little too dense so I've adjusted that which means I'll need to go back to level 02 and adjust it there too, Unless I leave it and figure on it being like the fog has lifted a little between levels, might mean I'll need to play with my sun's azimuth as well maybe??

Robot Character Tweaking

I thought I would take a little time today to tweak my Toy Wind Up Robot Character a little more. You see because he is using a projector for his "Blob Shadow Effect" which works very well for characters that are on the ground but because my toy robots are in the Tree House one of the things I noticed when I was testing out my game is that the projector casts the "Blob Shadow Effect" right through the floor of the Tree House and onto not only the tree below but also the ground. On the ground you do not see it very well because it gets wider and more dispersed the farther away in projects, you can see it clearly projecting through the floor of the Tree House. So I thought I would use my old method of a plane under the robot with the "Blob Shadow Effect" as it works better for this character who is above ground level.

I also added a couple of "Point Lights" to his arms with a "Flicker Script" attached so his lightning bolts will have a bit more of a realistic look to them. I'm going to see if I can find a nice sound effect for little electrical discharges to REALLY make him sweet!