Development Diary #6: On location

It’s taken me a while to get going this year but, in between commercial bits and pieces, I’ve been working on some environments. Although the overall narrative for the game is still coming together, I have loads of different locations already in mind that I’m trying to wind the story around. Most are based on real places or, more often, a combination of places that have stuck in my head. This week I’ve been working on a Victorian swimming pool…

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Light and shade…

Starting to get close to a look I’m happy with for the game so I figured I’d share a few notes on my setup. I’m aiming for a non-realistic, illustrative look, I want nice, distinct areas of flat colour, similar to watercolour washes or vector art, for this I’m using toon shaders and a ramp with no interpolation, i.e. solid bands of colour. Instead of the built-in shaders I’m using Toony Colors Pro and a great little tool called Ramps! which allows you to generate and adjust ramp textures right in the Unity editor, very handy for tweaking the look of things as you go…

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What’s in the box…

Writing up the last post about my point-and-click interface turned out to a be pretty good way of keeping me organized so I thought I’d do the same for my current inventory setup. As before, I’ll be using Playmaker, this time I’ll also be using Arraymaker and EasySave2 so you’ll need the actions for those as well…

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Pointing and Clicking…

As a few people have asked, I thought I’d share some notes about how I’m setting up my point-and-click interface with Playmaker. I’m pretty sure the Unity 4.2 update opened up NavMesh to Basic users but I don’t think the IK rig is accessible, I’m using that for its “look at” control so you’ll need Pro to recreate this setup completely. You’ll also need the custom actions for both Pathfinding and Mecanim…

There are several things I wanted the character to do in response to a click from the user:

  • look at where the click was made
  • turn to face that point
  • walk towards that point
  • upon arrival, complete an action of some kind

It would also be nice to have a method for stopping a walk before completion and for clicked items to have their own pre-defined destinations eg. clicking on a mountain could result in walking to a balcony to look rather than all the way to the mountain…

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