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.