So this post is going to be more of a two part update as I completely forgot to make one last week. Luckily the last couple weeks of development have both been parts of the prototyping phase, so in theory you could say I'm saving precious bytes of cloud space by doing them both in one post ;) Anyways, last week our team, now officially dubbed "Heart Throb Games", began to focus on and prototype for our main three ideas: a spellcasting FPS, an island based action/adventure game, and a sci-fi themed battle racing game. Since we have 3 members of the team used to prototyping in Unity, we decided to divide the task of making these prototypes to Lenny, Tom and me respectively. Taking on the racing prototype, my first thought was to look at the wheel colliders built in to Unity to see if I could get the effect I wanted from them. Before working with them, I heard horror stories from many designers that these colliders were less than ideal and a pain to work with, and after trying to implement them into our project well...
It was not easy to get something solid working with the wheel colliders. Even after I was able to actually create a car I could control, it moved way too slow and just didn't feel good to drive at all. In order to save myself more time and effort for something that may not have worked out in the end I decided to take a different approach to controlling the vehicle.
Instead I to looked at F-Zero GX, a racing game on the Gamecube that was one of our team's inspirations for this concept. After playing a bit and getting a feel for it, I noticed that Nintendo used a much more arcade-like control scheme, opting to perform turns with a simple axis rotation and using a sideways strafe on the controller's bumpers to perform drifts on tight corners. I took note of these things and gutted my current car's script and rewrote it to create the controller below.
Gotta love unity crashes
Much happier with this version of the car I showed it to the team. Everyone said they liked the main control scheme but would prefer to have a more instant force dash than a strafe on the bumpers, which I implemented in the next iteration along with a racing camera system.
[Will add gif of this later, didn't have the time to go back and record today]
Our second phase of prototyping came this week. Our team decided to focus in on two main ideas, the island adventure and racing games, and merge the mechanics of the spellcasting fps into the combat of the island game. Our new tasks for this week were to iterate on previous prototypes, more specifically to flesh out the combat system for our adventure game and to refine the car's controls and create a testable track for the racer. Since most of the car's variables were public and could be tweaked in the Unity inspector we decided to switch around the delegation of tasks this round, opting for Lenny to put together a track and tweak the car to match it, and for me and Tom to take on designing and creating movement and combat for the adventure game.
At our work meeting for the week Tom and brainstormed a basic combo system in which the player uses different elemental attacks to charge up their "ultimate attack meter". Once that meter is full, the player can perform an ultimate attack which fires off elemental spells in rapid succession based on the type of magic you used to charge it with. Tom created a VDD that described this system and it was up to me to implement a proof of concept on how it would work.
Things didn't go well on my side of things unfortunately. A mixture of Unity input management problems, weird bugs when trying to make a build, and poor time management on my part in relation to the coursework of my other classes led to a very lackluster demo being created. The demo shows how this system could work using a fire spell and a bit of how enemies would react to it, but the character and camera controllers were unfinished and the combat feels more bullet hell style than combo based. In the future I will make sure that my tasks are done or at least mostly complete well before the day of class, but for now we will have to present this.
[Will add this gif later as well]
After this weeks class our team will decide on the game we really want to go forward with and start focusing all our time into it. I'm really excited to have that conversation but also not completely sold on one idea yet; however after deliberation I think I'll be able to make a solid choice.
-Cory