Rocks and Water..

Early progress on the starting level of the main world. Didn’t get as much done as I would like due to some necessary clean up in the core mechanics. Finally moved the player attack from “Space Bar” and “Left Mouse” to just “Space Bar” on PC. User will only have to jump to attack instead of worrying about multiple clicks. I had been planning this for awhile but finally needed to do this to test the current state of the level.

Fixed a few bugs. One in the player attack to correctly exit pounce mode when the player collides with the ground. I was passing the wrong collider causing the player to remain in pounce mode well after the act. This allowed the user to eat multiple bunnies without having to pounce on them, and well, I just can’t allow such unchecked carnage to continue.

Second bug caused the user to hover in the air and get stuck flying around after a successful kill. This was caused by the collision volumes used by the bunnies that prevent them from falling through the world. Sometimes when you pounce, you will hit the creatures collision volume before the kill is triggered. This caused the collision hit to register as the ground and cut out the gravity momentarily for the player. So now you are in mid air, nothing below you as the bunny was killed, no gravity, and no way to touch the ground. Thus you fly around aimlessly until you run into something and hopefully trigger a collision and re-enable gravity. FUN TIMES!

The following set of images are the work in progress shots of the level as I went. The first image is the wonderfully messy chicken scratch I did on paper trying to sort out the initial ideas.

The following one is the initial mock up in the level editor. I decided for the moment to pick a part of the world that would work relatively well instead of generating new terrain this early in the process. I then put box colliders all over to funnel the player where I would like them to go. Played through it a bazillion times and adjusted things as I felt was needed.

This is the described image of the above. The user starts in the cave on the far left of the area. They proceed to exit the cave and head upwards to the left, following the white set of arrows. I then force the user to learn the jump / attack key by requiring them to maneuver over an obstacles (The glorious tutorial tree log). They then proceed to follow the path to a second jump. Attempting this jump will result in a failure, where the player will fall into the crevice. This is needed to teach the player that hunting results in player changes. Following the crevice down to the right leads the player to multiple creatures which they will (hopefully) kill. Upon a successful kill the player will grow to full size. They will then follow the blue arrows and be forced to reattempt the failed jump. This time they will be able to succeed resulting in their exit from the area.

Next up I started adding creatures while fixing bugs and prettying things up a bit. I started messing with water shaders, which I haven’t touched yet in development. I’m using the Unity advanced water standard asset. I pretty much disabled 90% of it and tweaked it to better fit the style I’m going for. Unfortunately even with all the advanced portions of it turned off it still doesn’t compile the same on android. I’m going to have to find or make an alternative version or see if I can tweak the shader myself to get it to compile the same on mobile.

Next up for the level is the portion after the crevice jump. I need to come up with a process for rapid seasonal changes. After that I’ll revisit whats there to look at it with fresher eyes before I start worrying about making it all look good.