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!

We Love Bud The Spud

A little video capture of some of the game play action in my indie game development projects called "Bud the Spud." In this video you can see many of the changes and improvements I have made along the way from level 01. I've improved the blood splat effect using projectors to ignore the static layer so as when my enemy characters pass through the effect it will no longer project on top of them any more. Also it does not project onto the "Fertilizer Pellets" too.
In this video you can see the damage effect that the "Potato Beetles" take when "Bud" jumps on them and their blood spurt effect. Also witness a very unsuccessfully attempt at jumping over on of the "Hibachi BB Q's" and the burning death "Bud" will suffer as a result. Also shows how he starts back at the levels beginning after such a death.

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 ;)

Level 03 Developments

I've had some good stuff happen today and I've had a lot of frustrations as well. First off I spent a good deal of the day today trying to figure out why every time I baked my light maps using the Beast light mapper in Unity 3D that all of my materials that are being effected by the light maps seem to loose not only their specular properties but also the Bump mapping or "Normal Maps" as Unity calls them get lost, deactivated or no longer seem to have the desired effect?? I spent a lot of time searching for an answer to that problem and I think it's just another one of those if you want light maps and bump maps it's a Pro Only feature... another way to stick it to us struggling artist who are desperately trying to accomplish something half descent on a next to nothing budget Grrrrr. Maybe I'm wrong but none of the answers I managed to find so fare point otherwise :(

I did however FINALLY manage to figure out how to get that blasted lens flare effect for the sun. That was another thing I thought certain was a pro only feature. So I'm somewhat happy that I can do that cool effect at least.

I did a lot of playing around with lighting today using Beast, adjusting my directional light and playing around with my setting trying to see if I can get my level lighted nice before I go too nuts adding all the other stuff into the level. Here you can see "Bud the Spud" standing on the top lookout of the Tree House with that nice sunlight lens flare behind him. I added some more trees, rocks and some bushes to the terrain and placed in an extra health pickup just to work out his jumps across the rocks to get it and get that part working right. I'm still trying to figure out how to get him to make a tighter turn around for when he is standing on small rocks or branches as this would greatly improve his being able to climb up the ladder boards of the Tree House.

Tomorrow I'll see about getting the "Wind up Toy Robot" happening.

Tree House Placement

Took me a while to add all of the foliage planes to my model and then once I got the model into Unity 3D I had to change each material to the "Big Tree" texture materials in unity manually which took a while as I had to do each one separately and there are close to 200 of them. Then I had to go in and remove their colliders as they are not needed here.

While giving it a testing to see how difficult it would be for "Bud the Spud" to climb up the ladder to get into the tree I found it a bit difficult with just the mesh collider alone so I created a few empty game objects and gave them box colliders, tweaked them into position and scaled them to fit each ladder board. It makes it a lot easier to climb now although once he is at the top of the ladder it a bit tricky trying to jump onto the branch so I may need to make a small wooden board nailed to the tree branch to serve as a place to jump onto just to make that a lot easier because although it can be done it does not feel or look quite right as he kind of lands on the side of the branch which looks a bit awkward. I'll see about making a small extra model that I can just import and place into position and adjust as needed.

I place the 2nd key pick up in the location I wanted for it. You would really have too look for this one which is just what I want a bit of a hunting challenge for my players. But I'll mention a little clue here. On the lookout platform there is a hole in the floor that Bud can drop down through onto branches below ;)

I have to add a lot more decorations and things to do in this level but I'm trying to keep this one as simple as I can, that last level was much larger than I had expected it to be which kind of surprised me because there is not really that much to do in that level.

• Explore it a bit
• Find the two keys
• Pick up a Health pick up
• Pick up a Extra Life pick up
• Kill Worms & Potato Beetles
• Jump over two Hibachi BB Q's
• Use the ball to get on top of the 3rd wall
• Find the exit

See not that much at all. This level it's more get across the mud bogs safely, kill Worms and Potato Beetles, climb the tree into the Tree House and find the two keys, make it the rest of the way across the mud bogs to the exit and you're done level 03 :)

Level 03 Tree House WIP Continued

In continuing with yesterdays post I thought I would keep you up to date on how the Tree House is coming along. I've been busy all day mostly just adding the foliage to the tree. Because it's going into Unity 3D in my game environment I figure I might as well use the "Big Tree Leaves & branches" from the standard terrain assets pack. Because Max does the transparencies a little differently than in Unity I had to make a new reversed transparency map from the alpha channel in the unity "Big Tree Leaves & Branches" PSD files and use that in order the get the same effect you see here in my Max render using "Mental Ray." As you can see I've added some more branches to the tree and started to texture a few of the simple things like the tin roof that only needed a simple box texture mapping. I'll see if I have time to do the UVW texture mapping for things like the tree house parts and the tree trunk but that will depend on how much longer it will take me to add some more foliage to the tree, I still want to fill it out a little more in a few areas, but overall it's coming along nicely I think.

I was trying to think of things one might see in a tree house although I could not think of much outside of a few things like wooden boxes to sit on, an old cable cart for a table, a crude wooden bench, and maybe some comic books. Maybe some toy blocks on the floor and the occasional cola can. I'll have to see if I can search the Internet and see if I get some ideas from there.