It begins! It has been a busy week of gathering tutorials, setting up a discord, getting everyone on page with Plastic SCM, and finally starting work in Unity.
Our Theme?
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Set during a cataclysmic event – perhaps nuclear winter – the player is forced to seek shelter in a nearby bunker. However, little do they know that they are now trapped with no food or supplies unless they can solve the puzzles in all of the rooms and access safety deeper below…or is it really safe down there after all?
The work should split nicely, with each of us getting a particular “room” and the Death themed hub room being a collaborative effort.
My room represents “War”, and what better theme than something loosely based on the 1983 classic film War Games. In particular, the NORAD scenes. Here is a rough sketch of my concept with puzzle ideas:
However a game project needs a lot of fleshing out. We have decided on a first person camera and I set to work creating a test environment. In a day I’ve managed to cobble together a basic grabbing and dropping system.
Of course this system came with some rather amusing bugs as well:
I was able to fix this by placing the player and grabble objects on different layer masks, and then disabling their interactions in project settings. Seems simple, but took me a good while to figure this out.
Another roadblock involves kinematic physics object. In order to move grabbable objects smoothly with the player, i needed to make them kinematic. This means that they will only interact with other physics objects and not simple colliders. Essentially, they will clip through walls and static objects – but push and knock around other physics objects.
This could prove to be problematic if the player shoves a necessary item through a wall and lets good. Adjusting the distance a held object is from the player can prevent things falling through the floor…but walls were going to be an issue.
The solution? Extended invisible walls around side surfaces will “push” the object back” towards the player. Here is an example of the problem and the solution:
While there might be a more elegant solution to be found, after hours of research I could not find something that fit well…so for now the solution will be resigned to effective level design.
