Tasks Accomplished: Week 7
| Technical Tasks | Art Tasks |
| Big amount of work setting up the environment to properly implement everything having to do with NavMesh | Critiqued music WIPs from hired composer |
| Modeling assets we need that I haven’t been able to find open source | Designed a necronomicon-like book |
Modular Thoughts
Thanks to the Kenney assets I’ve been working with, I’ve been able to create prefabs of buildings very quickly. This has saved me a lot of time from modeling my own buildings for the project, for which I’m extremely grateful.
In my previous blog post, I mentioned I would be painting my own textures on top of Kenney’s assets to retain stylistic consistency. I still plan to do this, but I realize I may need to create multiple versions of the same prefabs to diversify the texturing. If everything is instanced from the same few base models, the immersion of our project will be broken.
Environmental Thoughts
But before I can go ahead and start texturing the prefabs, I need to actually set up the environment. This involves setting up mesh colliders and NavMesh obstacle collision boxes on everything. Doing this was easy, but actually arranging everything on our low poly island has been pretty tedious.
For example, the thin line of fencing that the below WIP shows– this stops the player from accidentally running off the hill without being able to climb back up, as well as making sure the pathfinding NPCs don’t actually fly up paths they should not be.
The next protective setup I needed to make was the ring of walls to stop the player from running off the island and effectively breaking the game. The modular features of Kenney’s castle assets didn’t quite do the trick to encompass an elliptical shape, but it works as long as I’m okay with penetrating meshes. In the end, I’m alright with that given I’m primarily working with open source content to help us move along.
I also started blocking areas that will be designated as interactable areas for the player to advance the story using groups of prefabs (made from, of course, Kenney assets). These areas will contain NPCs that the player can talk to obtain the items on their grocery list. Since all of the talkative NPCs will be all around the island, this requires the player to explore the island.
Last, I’ve started blocking the cult building that the end of the game will take place in. I will need to carve a door frame out of the cylinder for our Elder to walk out of. That won’t be difficult in Maya, but still another task I need to keep in mind.
Tool Thoughts
Per my last blog post, I decided to look into Blender again so I can texture these low poly assets. I thought it’d be easier to texture them in live time by painting on an unwrapped UV map and seeing the results on the wrapped model immediately. To do this, I would need to learn the very basics of Blender before utilizing Primabase.
Below is my progress on Polygon Runway‘s Blender 3.0 Cute Mushroom tutorial:
This tutorial was recommended to me at a workshop I attended– it’s quite a nice tutorial!
Trying to make this game a reality.
Ryan Davis
